おる is kinda equivalent to いる but humble. So I think this is the same as 孕んでいねば (= 孕んでいなければ).
ねば is not used modernly anymore, but is found in literature.
わかるようでわからない means “in between understanding and not understanding”. I also don’t think this is a grammar point or anything like that. There’s a lot of those, I usually search until I find a similar expression and see if it’s explained somewhere.
The intent was for people that finished before the week started. But I hate this ambiguity, so I might not include the option next week. I’d rather everyone just select “Reading along”.
Regarding the poll, when I’m doing mine I put “already read” so that I can have a good understanding of the pace. If the majority are in “already read” that might mean that the pace must be raised. If the majority is in “not there” yet the pace is too fast. The best is to have a majority in reading along.
That’s just me thought.
That’s fair. I don’t see us deviating from the one chapter per week pace for this book club though. Unless everyone loves it so much they read way ahead. 
In this case I think it’s role language, i.e. how old men commonly speak in fiction.
As for ねば, it is simply the conditional/hypothetical form (仮定形) of ぬ which is why it appears a lot in Uehashi’s works. (In fact it occurs 22 times in this book, なければ only 16 times.)
Here’s some more information for those interested.
Do you know if there’s a reason, or is it for a stylistic reason to portray The Past?
I think it’s a more archaic form, which is why it doesn’t show up in modern speech.
I think I got this one, but I want to double check myself.
まるで、鞭で打たれでもしたかのように母が顔を上げたので、エリンはびっくりした。
I interpret the inner part as “Mother raised her head as if she was (even) struck by a whip”. And for that reason (ので) Erin was completely surprised.
Any mistakes or missing details on this one?
Nope, that’s how I read it as well.
How’s everyone feeling about the first chapter? I think it gave a pretty good introduction to the world and characters so far, without too much exposition. I got tripped up in a few places, but overall it wasn’t too difficult.
It was easier than expected if I forgot all the invented words. T.T I really like the story for now can’t wait for next week.
Well, I somehow remember it from that time I read it years ago. The main difference being that, instead of reading painfully slowly at 2 pages a day, I read everything in one sitting with a single dictionary look up (and it was just to confirm I got the reading right anyway) 
So my reading is roughly 30x faster than it was at the time, and yet my comprehension is probably much better as well.
Other than that, well, I like the setting, but we haven’t seen much yet. The part that gave me the most trouble back in the days is much further down the line, I really looking forward to it
I reread it despite having read the first half of the book several months ago. It started off faster than I remembered and was a pretty quick read. There’s just something about this book where I find myself wanting to keep reading.
Still working through it – I’m getting easily distracted by That Shiny Other Book
Edit: That said, I’m enjoying it and the style. Dictionaries help a lot to smooth the rough parts in the vocabulary. The grammar is about my level, which is nice.
What word?
All the political stuff?
Yeah, the grammar isn’t too bad. Vocab is a pain, as expected. I actually read much of it on kindle since I was reading while out and didn’t want to deal with a physical book. It certainly was convenient having a dictionary built in. If only the dictionary was built into my brain and I could use it with a physical book!
Welcome to the comprehensible-input land of ebooks!!!
The grammar is not so difficult, I have to check some of your suggestion but I got the gist of most of it. I’m reading on the kindle so the vocabulary part is the easiest…But I’m loading Anki right now
How many words did you add to Anki? I added 17 to Kitsun from the first chapter.
96😆 lately I started to use kitsun too, I’m thinking to switch to it completely