The Crawford County Sketchbook cover art

The Crawford County Sketchbook

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The Crawford County Sketchbook

By: Tom Janikowski
Narrated by: Bryan Stansbury
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About this listen

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr., is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue. The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty. Sheriff Cecil Morgan is the third in his line to hold his office, and like his ancestors, he is an avowed enemy of the Switchback family and all that they stand for.

The life of Crawford County plays out through the course of short tales told by several of its inhabitants, some tragic, some whimsical. The stories wind their way through the lives of Switchback and Morgan, framed by several ponderings of moral philosophy and existence. We are faced with Peter Switchback's obituary in the opening of the story, and the balance works its way to that eventual outcome.

©2012 Red Hen Press (P)2018 Red Hen Press Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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A bit of a punt taken on this one, probably because the cover drew me in. I have a weird aversion/fascination/attraction to animal masks. The book relates different episodes or incidents from a small place in the US, somewhere in the South and probably a figment of the author's imagination. To be fair I haven't Googled it to check. The narrator definitely had a strong southern accent which added to the stories and did evoke the setting in my mind.

I had a hard job tracking all the characters in the book. Each anecdote or tale has a different narrator or storyteller and I didn't really get the vibe from the blurb of the two different families and the sort of good vs bad opposites.

Some of the incidents are trivial, some humorous, some sad. We encounter death, love, grief, friendship and a lot more in the course of the book.

One pearl of wisdom from the author remained ..... hating, affects the hater, more than the hated...... or something like that.

I enjoyed the book, despite the lack of connection I felt between the different characters. It wasn't a waste of my time and I was never bored. A book which kind of passed the time before finding my next great read.

3 from 5

Read - (listened to) February, 2021
Published - 2015
Page count - 208 (5 hrs 12 mins)
Source - Audible purchase
Format - Audible

Enjoyable, but a bit disjointed

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