50th Episode Blowout: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Bodice Tipplers

You guys you guys this is it! This is the big one! We are fifty episodes old and we are going BIG! We have gotten so many requests for this one - we read The Thorn Birds, you guys, and we're gonna watch the miniseries (check social media for upcoming details about watching it with us!) and we got a secret guest (spoiler: Courtney's secret brother Nate) all the way from Australia, and of course it was a whole ass thing. We lost Courtney for half of it! It was a beast, but we had a blast and we offer it up to you as our 50-episode birthday present to everyone.

The Thorn Birds is one of those big family sagas they used to love to make a miniseries about. There's a big house. There's a spite will. There's a million characters who mostly don't matter and a million things happen that also mostly don't matter. There's Meggie, only daughter of the most ridiculously sterotypical Irish family to every Irish its way to New Zealand and then Australia. There's Ralph (RALPH!), tormented priest and self-absorbed piece of crap. There's other people who are related to these people but admit it, you're really here for Meggie and Ralph.

You should not read this book if you're sensitive to depictions of grooming (nothing sexual happens between Ralph and Meggie until she is an adult, but they meet when she is a child and he is clearly obsessed with her and behaves in a way that isn't sexualized but is deeply inappropriate), vividly described marital rape, stealthing (!) by a woman, priests breaking their vows... oh and for some reason these people castrate lambs with their teeth? I cannot WAIT for all the furious YouTube comments about how we don't understand that "people were different back then".