The Member of the Wedding is set of the course of a weekend in August, in a small Southern town. We meet Frankie, or F. Jasmine as she refers to herself later in the novel. She is a twelve year old, who doesn't quite know where she belongs and spends her days with Berenice, the 'coloured' maid, and John Henry, her six year old cousin. We see her being bored and longing for a life outside of her little town, outside of what she knows. She is fascinated by far away places and yearns to travel. She's not a child anymore and yet no one takes her quite seriously, which makes her obstinate, and she lashes out and tries to act tough.  That is until she learns of her brothers wedding. She decides she will be a member of the wedding and in fact also of the honeymoon and any adventures her brother and his bride will go on next. This gives her  new confidence and rather  new outlook on life. 
 This is a book about growing up, about wanting more, going further, dreaming bigger, looking for new horizons, but at the same time being comfortable in familiarity, the repetition and monotony of daily life and wanting everything to stay as it was. 
 With this book McCullers has been cemented yet more as one of my favourite authors. Her writing is exquisite, where you feel every sentence is deliberate, with not a word to few or too many and she continues to surprise me with her fresh choice of words. Even though this a short book, only set over a few days, we really get to know Frankie and McCullers captures the complexity of a young girls mind very well, without being condescending. 
 And as I am expecting of McCullers, she is a master at setting a scene and invoking the senses. There is one particular scene where Frankie, Berenice and John Henry are playing a card game in the kitchen, and they hear a piano being tuned in the neighbourhood. It is such a perfect capture of a lazy summer day, that I felt I was right there, even though I read this book during some rather gray and gloomy winter days. 
 I feel The Member of the Wedding is one of those books that will give me new things to discover anytime I read it and I would highly recommend it if you like books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, A tree grows in Brooklyn, or McCullers The heart is a lonely hunter.