Books Completed in August 2025

 Fan Service, Rosie Danan
Alex Lawson's never felt at home at her dad's place in Florida, where she's been ridiculed for his conservation efforts. The only place she feels at ease is online, where she creates a detailed website for her favorite television series The Arcane Files. But when she meets the star, Devin Ashwood, in person at a convention, a thoughtless remark he makes afterward turns her off him and his character, a werewolf who's also an FBI agent.

Years later, Devin Ashwood, the series over and looking for a new role, wakes up in a field nearly naked, and discovers from a news report that cameras caught him transforming into a werewolf. Everyone else thinks it's a promo for a revival of the series, but he realizes that somehow he's become a werewolf like the character he played on television and searches for a way to reverse it, finding Alex's detailed website. Not knowing she's the young woman he unwittingly insulted years ago, he travels to Florida to meet her. And to her surprise, she agrees to help him.

This is an engaging fantasy-romance with some hard truths about the traumas of child actors and bullied people who don't fit in.

  The Highwayman: A Longmire Story, Craig Johnson
Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear arrive in Wyoming's Wind River Canyon to help Rosey Wayman, an old friend of Walt's recently transferred to the area. She keeps hearing a mysterious radio message from a Highway Patrolman requesting assistance—except this Patrolman died years ago in a fiery crash. Wayman's supervisors think she's going nuts, so Walt and Henry need to figure out who's playing a prank on her—and, if it's not a prank, what's going on.

Great little novella with what seems like a supernatural twist—but it will keep you guessing until the end.

  Before Dorothy, Hazel Gaynor
Annie Kelly and her sister Emily, daughters of Irish immigrants, move to the bustling city of Chicago in the late 1800s to work at Marshall Field as salesgirls; Annie meets wealthy John and marries well, Emily falls in love with practical Henry Gale, who wants to homestead in Kansas. Annie tries to talk her out of it, but Emily and Henry are married, and he moves to Kansas to start a family farm while Emily waits until Annie's daughter is born to join him. A daughter named Dorothy.

This is the story of "Auntie Em" and her life before and then after Dorothy came to live in Kansas. Gaynor weaves a credible story about the homesteaders on the prairie, their early crop successes, and then the drought that came to ruin all their hopes of success. Becomes a vivid portrait not only of a woman trying to make her niece feel safe and loved, but of the Dust Bowl that scoured the land, ruined lives, and killed.

  For the Love of the Bard, Jessica Martin
Miranda Barnes, writer and literary agent, writer of young adult fic under the name of Hathaway Smith, is still smarting from bad reviews of her last novel, in which she killed off a popular main villain. She goes home to her parents at the little town of Bard's Rest, which revolves around Shakespeare and the town's annual Shakespeare festival, to complete the next novel in the series. Next thing you know, she's not only been roped into directing one of the festival plays by her actress mother, but she keeps encountering Adam Winters, the new town vet and the guy who ditched her on prom night to go with her older sister Portia, a hotshot lawyer. (Her younger sister Cordelia—sense a theme here?—is the town's favorite baker.)

Enjoyed the story and the characters. There's a sequel about Portia out as well. Wonder if Cordelia will get matched next?

  Writing Black Beauty, Celia Brayfield
This is not just the story of Anna Sewell and her family—her mother and aunt were also writers in "the domestic sphere" as was expected of women in their day—but of the growing movement of rights for animals, whose fate in the late 18th/early 19th century was grim: carriage and wagon horses beaten to death in the streets, vivisection, kittens and puppies drowned after birth. Alternating with the story of Sewell and her family is the story of a public becoming aware of the feelings and treatment of animals. Both an interesting story about Sewell's health problems and a little-known history of animal rights.

  Sweet Music, S.R. Morton
This book is the literary equivalent of watching Bob Ross painting shows. Really, nothing happens. Reverie Vyse, a faerie, and her best friend Cerise (also a faerie) run a bookstore and cafe. Decan Jarris applies for the job of barista after their current barista has to leave. He's a whiz at his job and soon business picks up even more. But Decan's deepest wish is to be a successful musician, but he's been beat down by doubts. His love of Reverie helps him accomplish that. Basically, the whole story is about moral support. It's very sweet.

Horrified to see in a published book the misuse of the word "phased." It should have been "fazed." Also, Decan (and sometimes Reverie) "smirk" too many times when a smile is supposed to be gentle or heartfelt. "Smirking" is sarcastic and is often used to hurt the person being smirked at, and is used correctly very rarely in this book.

  Why to Kill a Mockingbird Matters, Tom Santopietro
After a short overview of Nelle Harper Lee's childhood, the book goes into the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and the praise and notoriety the novel gained. then covers the making of the film before addressing other topics such as "Is To Kill a Mockingbird racist?", Harper Lee's descent into privacy, the publication of Go Set a Watchman and the hue-and-cry over the revelation that Atticus Finch was racist himself, and the continued relevance of the novel and the film in the 21st century. A natural for any fan of To Kill a Mockingbird. I had to read it after meeting Mary Badham in person!

  All the Feels, Danika Stone
College freshman Liv Walden, still smarting from the death of her father (who hooked her on the science-fiction universe of Starveil), is devastated when Matt Spartan, the hero of the Starveil universe, is killed in the latest film. Her best friend Xander, who dresses in steampunk fashion, tries to placate her, and her mother is determined that Liv's fandom obsession won't hurt her grades. Secretly, Liv creates another identity to start a campaign to bring Matt Spartan back, ropes Xander into helping her, and is astonished when the movement not only gains speed, but becomes a nationwide campaign.

I bought this because the second half of the book takes place at DragonCon (although I was giggling like crazy when Liv is looking at a panel schedule in July, since the D'Con schedule usually isn't up until two weeks before the con), and it does a good job capturing the frenetic madness taking place at five host hotels and the Atlanta Merchandise Mart every Labor Day weekend. It does a less good job explaining how Liv actually got her mom's permission to go to DragonCon (since her mom screamed at her because she failed calculus—although why in the frag did Liv take it in the first place? there's no math requirement in college, especially for someone who's studying the visual arts like she is, unless you're going into a math or science field). Or if they ever worked it out about her mom's busybody boyfriend whom her mom inappropriately shared private information with? Seems Mom was suddenly okay with fandom when she found out Liv could get a job in it!!!! And Xander with his "dearest" is simply too precious for words.

  Cranston Through Time, Sandra Moyer and Jent Cullen Ragno
Then and now photos from my old home town, including my high school, the old coal mine at Garden City Shopping Center, and even "the bad boys school" at Sockanossett.

  Frozen Heat, Richard Castle
This is #4 in the "Nikki Heat" series, supposedly written by the "Castle" of ABC television fame. Basically, the Nikki Heat books are Castle stories under a different name and a couple of tweaks. Kate Beckett becomes sexy Nikki Heat, Castle morphs into magazine journalist Jameson Rook (Castle/Rook, get it?), Ryan and Esposito are Raley and Ochoa, Laney Parish turns into Lauren Parry. Rook even has an actress mom; the only character missing is Alexis, and Captain "Montrose" has been replaced by the ineffective Captain Irons.

In this outing, the frozen body of a woman in her 40s is found in a suitcase that is inscribed with Nikki Heat's initials; this is because the suitcase belonged to Nikki's mother, who was murdered on Thanksgiving Eve years earlier and who's the reason Heat became a cop. Soon Heat and Rook are not only on the trail of the anonymous corpse's killer, but also finding out more about Cynthia Heat's death.

This is a complicated mystery that nevertheless contains many inside jokes: I’m convulsed by the names of a pair of detectives on loan to help solve the murder: Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds. Jameson Rook, Castle’s avatar, even has the line: “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something I like about Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds." (On Firefly, Nathan Fillion played Malcolm Reynolds.)

Books Completed in February 2025

 The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip, Jeff Guinn
Three odd ducks: buttoned up Henry Ford, famed inventor Thomas Edison, and, for the first few years of the trip, naturalist John Burroughs, took road trips together on the primitive vehicles of the time.

  James, Percival Everett
I was fascinated by the thought of Huckleberry Finn narrated by his companion Jim, until I read the book. Fascinating opening chapters about Jim's relationship with lonely Huck degenerates into a detour that has Jim performing with a minstrel troupe founded by Daniel Decatur Emmett who wrote "Dixie." I was very disappointed.

  Once Smitten, Twice Shy, Chloe Liese
Last book in the Wilmot sisters' trilogy. Juliet Wilmot is in Scotland, having escaped from a controlling fiance. She runs into shy Will Orsino, who turns out to be the best friend of her sister's finance, and tries to give him lessons in romance. The lessons turn into the real thing.

  Hearts of Darkness, Jana Monroe
Nonfiction. The story of a woman working with the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI.

 The Cliff's Edge, Charles Todd
The latest in the Bess Crawford series has our newly demobbed nursing sister accepting a job taking care of a minor noblewoman after gall bladder surgery. Lady Beatrice receives word that a member of her family has been seriously injured and asks Bess to help him, only for Bess to find out the young man is accused of having killed another man. Can she sort out the mystery before an innocent man is arrested?

The postwar adventures are not quite as taut as the wartime ones, but there is a hint of a different relationship approaching for Bess and her friend Simon Brandon.

  Dry Bones, Craig Johnson
An argument over who owns the bones of a dinosaur dug up on Native American land results in the death of Danny Lone Elk, who owned the property. An assistant district attorney and a passel of FBI agents make solving the crime even more difficult for Sheriff Walt Longmire, who enlists the help of his friends Lucian Connolly and Omar Rhoades. A subplot involving Walt's daughter Cady and her baby daughter Lola also holds repercussions for Longmire.

I love these books, but if I hear one more description about Vic's "tarnished" eyes I think I'm going to scream.

Books Completed Since September 1

  Dear Little Corpses, Nicola Upson
This is the tenth book in Upson's "Josephine Tey" mysteries in which the writer (the real Tey's actual name was Elizabeth McIntosh; Upson writes of Tey as an original character who wrote McIntosh's novels) is enjoying a quiet stay in at the country cottage she inherited from an aunt in the village of Polstead with her lover, Marta. It is the day before World War II is declared and the village is preparing for the arrival of evacuee children from London. Unfortunately the buses arrive with more children than expected and in the chaos a little girl named Annie from the village vanishes. The longer the search goes on, the more dire the consequences appear to be. In the meantime, an eccentric family take on one little girl but refuse to take her 10-year-old brother, who is temporarily billeted with Josephine and Marta, who are in conflict when Marta's demanding director, Alfred Hitchcock, requires she come to Hollywood early.

I love Upson's writing; she has the talent to make these mysteries sound as if they were written in the 1930s without the unfortunate racism and classism that was rampant at the time. This also captures the spirit of the day leading up to and then the days after Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, and the attitude of a small town preparing to take in frightened and bewildered children. The menace of secrets held within the village limits is also well portrayed. I really enjoyed this one.

  Border Crossings: A Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Emma Fick
This is the niftiest travel book I've seen in a long time. Fick and her "then-boyfriend, now-husband" Helvio, inspired by a used book about traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway, decide to do just that. They start in Beijing and end in Moscow. The unique thing about the book is that it's narrated in Fick's watercolor sketches and hand-lettered narrative. The whole thing is priceless...sketches of Mongolian nomads, Chinese train officials, countrysides, local houses, decorations, foods, passports, tickets, customs, animals, even the Moscow subway stations. It's fascinating, a real treat for the eyes.

 The Make-Up Test, Jenny L. Howe
Picked this up off the remainder table in Books-a-Million and discovered with amusement that it was set in a fictional college in Rhode Island (and the protagonist is from Maine)—it even features the Jack O'Lantern Spectacular at Roger Williams Park in one chapter. Allison Avery and her ex-boyfriend Colin Benjamin find they're going to have to work together in graduate school. Allison's looking forward to talking about literature and especially with working with Professor Wendy Frances, but the thought of teaching a class has her flummoxed. A whole book about people who obsess about books! And although Allison is plus-sized, it's not mentioned on every page of the book but exists as an undercurrent of the difficult relationship she has with her father. No crazy gay friends; they're all sane here. And Professor Frances is a wonderful, supportive character.

 The Rediscovery of America, Ned Blackhawk
An exhaustive scholarly history of how European exploration and settlement of North American, primarily the United States, ruined the thriving Native American settlements all over the continent. I was quite pleased to find an expansion of a history of the southwestern settlements like Acoma that Alistair Cooke touched on briefly in the second episode of his 1972 series America. Also enjoyed a further exploration of my home region of New England, if "enjoyed" can be properly used to refer to a narrative of steady betrayals and brutalities. I was also interested to learn of the contributions of Native American women like Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Elizabeth Bender Cloud in the fight for Native rights, since I had never heard any historical references to Native women, just modern ones like Wilma Mankiller. One must be strong-stomached to read the endless litany of broken agreements, unfulfilled treaties, and flat-out removals of indigenous people from the lands where their ancestors had fished, farmed, and hunted for ages, not to mention the terrible boarding schools and removal of children from their parents into foster care, where the kids were forbidden to speak about their heritage and they were often abused physically and sexually. Note that early settlement is covered more thoroughly than modern events.

I did find a minor error in the chapter which talks about the popularity of Westerns on television/in movies in the late 1950s featuring stereotypical and more than often offensive Native characters. Blackhawk states that Disney's "Peter Pan...Americanized the English tale Peter and Wendy and incorporated Indian characters and music in its depiction of Never Never Land." The "Red Indians" (as the British called them) in Peter Pan were ported directly from J. M. Barrie's book, which I read for the first time only a few years ago. Tiger Lily and the other members of her tribe were already there in glaring racist display, with Tiger Lily talking in a horrific "Pidgin Chinese" manner, substituting "Ls" for "Rs" ("Velly velly good" and similar dialog). It was repulsive. The British were apparently fascinated by American and Canadian "savages" and loved to see them in adventure tales.

 Truly, Madly, Sheeply, Heather Vogel Frederick
This is the last of the Pumpkin Falls mysteries, according to the advertisement, and I will miss Truly Lovejoy, her ex-military family, and her new home in New Hampshire. It's a busy autumn for the Lovejoys: Aunt Truly is marrying her old sweetheart, and they're buying a dilapidated farm on which they plan to raise sheep to make specialty yarn, plus at school they're building catapults in science class for the annual pumpkin toss. But someone seems to be trying to drive True and Rusty off their farm, not to mention decorative pumpkins are disappearing all over town. It will take Truly and her friends to solve both mysteries. And what about the new boy in school? Will he take Truly's mind off her friend Calhoun?

A couple of quibbles: What kind of fourteen-year-old still believes in haunted houses and ghosts, especially in a military family? And then there's the matter of the names of the sheep: One of the ewes (all but the ram named after famous women) is named "Frances" Scott Key? Couldn't another female historical figure have been found rather than turning a man's name into a woman's? Dolley after Dolley Madison, who saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington? Sybil for Sybil Ludington who rode through the night to call the militia to help at the Battle of Ridgefield? Anne for Anne Hutchinson, who was a woman minister in Rhode Island who was persecuted because women weren't supposed to preach the gospel? Celia for Celia Thaxter, famous New England artist? Sheesh.

This has the most beautiful cover of any of the Pumpkin Falls mysteries. I'd love to have a print of it to frame!

 Travels With George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, Nathaniel Philbrick
A delightful voyage with Philbrick and his wife (and their Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever Dora) as they retrace a tour of the entire United States as taken by George Washington by mostly carriage (but some by ship) between 1789-1791 to rally the states to accept the new Constitution. Like our first president, the Philbricks do the tour in stages following Washington's route via his journals and diaries, so it's a travelogue, a history of Washington's life, and a slice of life in post Revolutionary America all at once. I loved this book to death.

 The Ghost and the Stolen Tears, Cleo Coyle
The eighth book in the "Haunted Bookshop Mystery" series taking place in the fictional Quindicott, Rhode Island. Jack Shepard, the New York private eye shot dead in the entrance to the old bookstore now owned by Penelope Thornton-McClure and her aunt Sadie. Penelope, a widow with a school-age son, returned to her hometown and revived the fading shop, is the only one who can see Jack's ghost, now haunting the store. Alas, in this outing, as in the seventh book, Jack has turned into a martinet again, talking too much slang and bullying Penelope. As always, Penny's travel "back in time" sequences via Jack's lucky nickel are the most interesting parts of the book, and her two buddies Seymour the postman and Brainert the professor get more annoying by the day. Oh, the plot has to do with a missing necklace and a nomadic woman who travels around in her trailer.

 The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover, Paul Letersky with Gordon Dillow
This is Letersky's story of being an assistant to the famous and sometimes infamous J. Edgar Hoover. Letersky is evidently a Hoover fan, although he's not silent about Hoover's likes and dislikes. One hears so much about Hoover's buddy Clyde Tolson, but in this narrative he's a tottery cranky old guy. The best part of his book are Paul's stories about Helen Gandy, Hoover's private secretary for over fifty years, and about his own career as an FBI agent.

  It Happened One Fight, Maureen Lee Lenker
This book would be a lot shorter without the male and female protagonists constantly shoring up each other's egos once they finally begin talking to each other. It has its good parts—a lively 1930s based romance between Dash Howard (based on Clark Gable) and Joan Davis (based on Joan Crawford and Bette Davis), who find themselves married after a prank. So they go to Reno to make a film, after which they will be publicly divorced. But they've always had feelings for each other. and things don't go as planned.

Lenker has a nice sense of the 1930s, and so many of the things the actors endured back then (including the casting couch and pleasing gossip columnists, even if the latter costs your soul). In the end, though, I felt a bit empty.

  Pony, R. J. Palacio
Silas Bird is an unusual 12-year-old. Some years earlier he was struck by lightning and survived. Brought up in a solitary cabin by his photographer father in the 1860s, one night rough riders abduct his father to help with some sort of project that will make him a fortune. His father tells him to wait at the cabin until he returns, but after two days he packs up and mounts the bald-faced pony the kidnappers had brought with them and then apparently escaped. The pony leads him—and his "imaginary companion" Mittenwool—to a wood where he teams up with a grizzled marshal looking for counterfeiters, and this is only the beginning of Silas' adventure. Silas is a very peculiar boy and I was irritated by the narrative at first, but the story soon becomes very compelling.

Warning: some people have had problems with this story because there's a very subtle gay character in it. Big deal.

 The Best American Travel Writing 2021, edited by Padma Lakshmi
I don't know what possessed me to buy this book after what happened in 2020...but I was pleasantly surprised! Many of the essays had to do with staying home during the pandemic and missing travel or discovering new things about staying at home, or what happened to travelers during the pandemic, like the first story about quarantine on a cruise ship "Mississippi: A Poem, in Days" and "Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream" are the two best, and most sobering, essays about Black travelers and the challenges they still face in America's tourist places. Deep sea diving, the residents of Las Vegas, bathhouses, traveling and suicide—I don't think I caught a bad essay here.

  Heat Rises, Richard Castle
This is the third in the series of "Nikki Heat" novels supposedly written by the author hero of the television series Castle. The stories are basically extended Castle stories with the characters' names changed and a couple of tweaks. Kate Beckett = sexy Nikki Heat, Richard Castle = magazine journalist Jameson Rook (Castle/Rook, get it?), Captain Montgomery = Captain Montrose, Ryan and Esposito = Raley and Ochoa, Laney Parish = Lauren Parry. (Rook's mom is also an actress, and has a part in this novel as well.) In this outing, Heat is called to a crime scene at a bondage dungeon where the victim turns out to be a priest. As she works on the case, she's supported by someone from "higher up"—until she gets too close to information no one wants revealed. Surprisingly complicated and nonstop plot includes a nail-biting chase through one of the tunnels under Central Park. Really enjoyed this one.

  Yesterday's Britain: The Illustrated Story of How We Lived, Worked and Played, by Reader's Digest
This is a delicious coffee-table sized book (a little over 300 pages) summing up the years 1900-1979 (with a brief coda to the end of the 20th century) in Great Britain starting with chat about the new century, through agonizing Edwardian fashions to the terror and carnage of "the Great War" to the sparkling Twenties that landed, like the United States in a 1930s crash, to explode into World War II.

As usual with these books, I get bored once I get to the 50s with all the rock and roll and later hippie stuff, but it's all good with photos, pamphlets, maps, advertisements, and personal recollections. Found this at the library book sale. Would love if there was one for France...I wonder!

  Her Name, Titanic, Charles Pellegrino
This is a nifty combination of a narrative of the voyage of the Titanic alternating with Pellegrino's interviews of Bob Ballard and the story of how Ballard and his crew found the wreckage of the doomed liner. Even if you've already read other Titanic books, Pellegrino's narrative of the night of April 14, 1912, is compelling and interesting, and even contains trivia I didn't know. The latter includes Pellegrino talking about his dad, who worked on the Minuteman missile program. There's an interesting parallel introduced by Pellegrino between the Titanic and the space shuttle Challenger, since both were done in by ice.

Not your typical Titanic book!

Books Completed Since April 1

 The Yankee Road: Tracing the Journey of the New England Tribe That Created Modern America, Volume 2: Domination, James D. McNiven
Okay, let me get this out first: I loved the first book in this series, and I loved the text of the second, but I'm annoyed as all get-out about two things.

First, apparently there was a second edition of the first book in which McNiven removed the final two chapters and incorporated it into this second book. I understand his reasons for doing so—thematically it better fit the divisions of the texts: Expansion, Domination, and Apotheosis. But then when I read the second book, I've already read the first two chapters, so I felt a little bit cheated.

Worse, McNiven didn't put the same copious notes he had in the first book in the second book—and these were great notes, they were practically another book!—but instead, to keep the price of the book down, he put the notes online. Hey, I'm online, so I can go read the notes at www.theyankeeroad.com anytime. But what about people who aren't on the internet or who don't want to be? They are royally cheated, and frankly I want to read the notes on a book in the book, not one by one via text links on a web page. So I feel cheated twice.

The remainder of the book? Great trip along US20 all the way, from Erie, Pennsylvania, and the War of 1812 to the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania and how it became an industry to settlement of the Western Reserve to John Brown's raid, all the way down to the Kelloggs of Battle Creek and the founding of Gary, Indiana, once a bustling industrial city and now a bleak part of the Rust Belt, and all the participants descendants of the thrifty Yankees that settled the northeast corner of the United States, from Daniel Dobbins at the Battle of Lake Erie to the Rockefellers.

But I want the dang notes back!!!!

 Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough
I've heard about this book for years, quoted in other books, but could never find a reasonably-priced copy until I found one on the library's "perpetual book sale" shelves. It's the entertaining read about two young women who scrimp and save their money in order to sail to Europe in the heady years after the first World War. Practical Cornelia and slightly feather-headed Emily take the cheapest cabins on a Canadian liner, only for the ship to run aground in the St. Lawrence River before they ever reach the ocean. Until they can get another ship, they stay with a friend of Cornelia's mother, only to have Cornelia contract measles from the children there. Eventually she's spirited off the ship and their adventures...or further adventures...continue in England and then in France.

This is a great view of traveling in the 1920s, with bulky purses for your money worn under your skirts for security, the threat of bedbugs everywhere (I was quite astonished at Cornelia's reaction, more upset because it ruined how she looked than that the bed actually was infested; apparently this was a common travel hazard of the time—::shudder::), language barriers at a time when English was not a universal language, the old-fashioned customs of the two countries that no longer exist, money problems, and of course humor from Emily, whose wits are sometimes less than she needs (both young ladies think they are worldly, but in reality they are terribly naïve: there's an especially funny couple of pages where Cornelia's parents attempt to explain to the girls why the two men they met at a party were more interested in each other than them, without once mentioning the forbidden word "homosexual").

If you're interested in a "Roaring 20s" version of The Grand Tour or classic American humor, give this one a try. You'll be glad of the internet and travel guides by the time you're done and get a good laugh at the same time.

 Grace to the Finish, Julie Hyzy
In what looks like it might be the last of the Manor House mysteries, Grace Wheaton's life has begun to change after she is declared Bennett Marshfield's heir, and she has a chance to be the silent partner when her roommates, wine-shop owners Bruce and Scott, move into a new location, a classic old building. But when Grace and the guys go to inspect the new home of Amethyst Cellars, they find the dead body of a loan officer from the bank at the foot of the stairs. It looks like a vagrant living in the building might be the culprit, but once they start investigating the victim, peculiarities begin to appear.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Grace's bad-girl sister Liza has been released from prison early, and is now back in Emberstowne looking for her "fair share" of the Marshfield fortune.

While I enjoyed the process of the murder investigation, as well as Grace's rocky beginning at romance with the local coroner, it's the suspenseful subplot with greedy Liza and acerbic Aunt Belinda that gave me the most satisfaction. I've probably read the final eleven pages of Chapter 32 about a dozen times, each time with no less glee.

I dunno, there still may be mysteries for Grace to solve, and lousy Liza will still be close by, and the matter with Grace's new guyfriend isn't complete yet...so perhaps not the last?

 The Book, Keith Houston
From the same author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, it's a book about...well, guess what. We start with a surface to write upon: first papyrus, which gave its name to paper; then parchment, then the story of rag paper (which is from China, but who actually created it and who legend says created it are two different things), and then the explosion of need for paper which brought wood pulp (and then yellowing, fragile paper) into the mix. Next a history of writing (I was astonished to learn that most scribes who copied books were not literate; they were not copying words, but shapes) that became at first carved pages and then moveable type and finally increasingly more mechanized typesetting; next illustration from hand-drawn to woodcut to etching to halftones; and finally the form of the book: tablets to scrolls to folds to paged volumes.

Houston has a delightful, light but always informative style in which you learn much and enjoy doing it. The Book is peppered with illustrations about books, and every page leaves you wanting more. A must for every bibliophile.

  Grave on Grand Avenue, Naomi Hirahara
LAPD bicycle officer Ellie Rush is back in her second adventure, working her way up in the ranks rather than trying to rely on her aunt, Cheryl Toma, the assistant chief of police. This time she and a co-worker are working crowd control on a concert in which a noted Chinese cellist will be playing. Minutes after Ellie exchanges pleasantries with an Hispanic gardener, the man has fallen down a set of stairs, accused of trying to steal the Chinese cellist's priceless instrument, but stopped by the cellist's father. When the gardener dies, a manhunt is on for the father; in the meantime, a bank robber dressed as an elderly woman is terrorizing banks. Ellie's personal life is getting chaotic as well: her ancient car has been stolen, her ex-boyfriend (who she's remained friends with) is acting distant, and her best friend is more and more absorbed in her new reporting job—and if she hasn't had enough jolts, her father's long-lost father (thought to be dead) turns up on her doorstep.

I'm enjoying this series not only for the mystery and for learning about LA's bicycle corps, but because of Ellie's ethnic mix of family and friends. Usually the protagonists of these cozy mysteries are so whitebread and cliche that they're not only boring, but all mix together: which one's the heroine of the knitting mystery, which is the lead in the craft mystery; which is the historical character who solves the mystery, etc. The family and friend dynamics are just as interesting to me as the mystery, which was reasonably complicated and satisfactorily solved. However, I'm damned sick of Aunt Cheryl dumping a bunch of responsibility on Ellie that isn't hers. She may be a great assistant chief of police, but she's a rotten aunt.

 Pagan Christmas, Christian Ratsch and Claudia Muller-Ebeling

 America and the Great War, Margaret E. Wagner
This is a super almost coffee-table sized book chronicling the history of the United States' reaction to and then our entrance into what became the first World War. Starting with a prologue that covers the sinking of the Titanic (I didn't realize that although Titanic was under British registry she was financed by J.P. Morgan) to the early months of 1914, and continuing with the outbreak of the war in Europe and the U.S.'s efforts to stay out of what was seen as a squabble among degenerate royalty and far below lofty American ideals, with Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet keeping a distance despite European efforts to get the country to take sides and offer assistance. Unfortunately submarine warfare, news of atrocities by the Central Powers in Belgium and Armenia, suspected sabotage, and other indignities eventually caused the government to change its mind.

I really appreciated this book for showing me how the unrest in Mexico contributed to our participation in the war. It is still difficult for me to resolve how a country so adamant about not being involved in the conflict could suddenly turn about to become so rabidly for participation, with even children's books having war-related plotlines and improbable "Hun" spy stories. Usually when one hears what was going on in the North American continent before April 2017, you have a few paragraphs about Pancho Villa and General Pershing, but there were actually a succession of clashes between Mexican insurgents along the U.S. border and deaths of American citizens before the infamous Zimmerman Telegram tipped the scales. Also, there were many more ships, both civilian and military, sunk by U-boats than the Lusitania and the couple others that are mentioned in most histories. (Amazingly, while the U.S. was neutral, German submarines visited our shores, most notably in Newport, RI, where the captain gave tours of the ship while a message was being relayed to him!) Also focused on are woman's suffrage efforts during pre-war and war years, efforts of African-Americans to gain fair treatment, and finally the innocent "grippe" that eventually killed more men than the war, the so-called "Spanish influenza."

Produced with items from the archives of the Library of Congress, the volume is stuffed with color and black-and-white posters, documents, photographs, political cartoons, propaganda items, book and manual covers, maps, and other illustrations to heighten the experience. There's even a photograph of that "infamous Zimmerman telegram"!

In some ways this book is a hard read, not because of the war casualties, but how a mob mentality and the Sedition Acts made former German-surnamed neighbors into enemies and how American freedoms were curtailed due to fears of spies, sabotage, and plain old xenophobia. In some ways creepier than the combat stories because these vigilantes were supposed to be working for good.

 Perish from the Earth, Jonathan F. Putman
The second in Putman's "Lincoln and Speed" mysteries reunites Joshua Speed, Springfield general storekeeper, and Abraham Lincoln, at this time a circuit lawyer in Illinois. As the story opens, Speed has just made the departure on the "War Eagle," a steamship in which his father has invested, and which is losing money. While aboard, Speed watches as a drunken young planter gamble away money he was taking back to his father and older brother, accusing the man with whom he played of cheating. The captain has the young man taken back to his cabin to sober up, but when the boat makes port in the town of Alton, Speed is aghast when he and Lincoln come upon the young planter's body floating in the river. The supercilious town constable, a transplanted Frenchman who considers himself a genius at crime solving, immediately arrests an artist who was also aboard the ship and who was said to have quarreled with the young planter.

Speed and Lincoln's efforts (along with Speed's freethinking younger sister Martha) to clear the painter plunge them into secrets they couldn't have imagined, kept by the ship's captain, his majordomo, and other townspeople, as well as the frightening specter of mob violence that erupts in the town when a noted abolitionist refuses to stop printing his inflammatory newspaper.

I enjoyed the previous book and this as well, even if it presents unflinching looks at the early hatred of abolitionists, frontier "justice," and the horrors of slavery (minus the actual racist language that would have been used). Once again, as in the first book, one of my favorite parts of the story is the way it's told, with the author using as much early 19th century language and grammar as possible without making the story not understandable to modern audiences. It gives it a particular authenticity, although it appears toned down from the previous book.

My only problem with the book was an anachronism: in one scene, a character starts to "unstrap his Jurgensen watch" from around his wrist, which implies it's a wristwatch, but wristwatches for men were not even conceived of until the Boer War and not commonly worn until the first World War, plus Jurgensen didn't start making wristwatches until 1919. That really distracted me from the early 19th century setting.

 Re-read: Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman
The film of this book popped up on TCM recently, and after rewatching it I couldn't resist re-reading the book. I found my original copy in a used bookstore many years ago, knew the title only by reference, but, upon opening it and being seduced by its unique narrative, quickly snatched it up. My current copy has an introduction by the author telling how the story was written, how difficult it was to sell due to the unique format, how the book took her from obscurity to fame, and how, even in 1991 when the introduction was written, the story was still relevant.

Heck, even now in 2018 it's still relevant.

Instead of being told in a standard first- or third-person narration, Kaufman's classic story of a neophyte teacher in a tough New York high school is told in the printed chaos of Sylvia Barrett's first semester at Calvin Coolidge High: handouts, flyers, compositions, memos, the student entries from the Suggestion Box she places in her homeroom, frantic interoffice communications, students' notebooks, plus Sylvia's regular letters to her friend Ellen, in which she laments her inadequacies in transferring her love of English to children who are hobbled by absent parents, racial prejudice, unrealistic dreams, gang violence, drugs, and simple hopelessness. At once humorous, infuriating, sobering, illuminating and just plain entertaining. You'll remember Sylvia, motherly Bea, flighty Henrietta, officious J.J. McHabe ("Admiral Ass"), prima donna Paul, mousy Sadie Finch, the helpless school nurse, the librarian who hates books being taken from the library and the guidance counselor who fancies herself Freud, and the mysterious janitor who's always "not here," plus students like Joe Ferone, Jose Rodriguez, Alice Blake, Linda Rosen, Rusty O'Brien, Edward Williams, and Harry A. Kagan, "the students' choice," long after you close the covers.

 Murder in Greenwich Village, Liz Freeland
Louise Faulk has fled her dull life as her uncle's bookkeeper for his butcher shop in Altoona, Pennsylvania (and a secret that is slowly revealed as the book progresses) and is working for a small publisher in New York City thanks to her Auntie-Mame-like aunt whose nonconformist views hide the fact she writes bestsellers about sweet country girls. Louise and her roommate Callie attend one of Aunt Irene's famous parties, then come home to find Callie's pest of a visiting cousin, the mousy Ethel, has been murdered wearing Callie's glamorous clothes in Callie's bed. The creepy son of the landlady tells the police he saw a blond man on the stairs earlier, one that matches the description of Callie's married lover Sawyer. But it also matches the description of the promising writer Louise met at Aunt Irene's party, and of Otto, who fancied himself in love with Louise and has just arrived in NYC to have one of his songs published by a Tin Pan alley firm. Worse, the police arrest Otto with little evidence. Louise is determined to prove it isn't him, Callie's out to prove it isn't Sawyer, and detective Muldoon is determined to get them out of his hair.

The mystery is pretty good in this one, but it's yet another book about a plucky young woman who doesn't hold with convention and is determined to find the real culprit even if it puts her life at risk, which it certainly does at the end. I guessed Louise's secret pretty early in the book as well.

My biggest problem with this book is that it takes place in 1913 and despite numerous references to Tin Pan Alley, jazz, shoes peeking out from under long skirts, suffragettes, and the saxophonists living in Louise's building, plus a final brief reference to "war breaking out in the Balkans," I never got the feeling that it was 1913. Without those few details it could have been the 1920s or the 1930s. I didn't want scads of minute descriptions of everything, but the story didn't feel tied to the time period, and the characters talked not much differently than we do today, using very little period slang. However, I would probably read another book about Louise.

 The Sherlock Chronicles, Steve Tribe
This nifty book was released just after third season of Sherlock aired. It's a combination of "making of," behind the scenes photographs, the occasional Holmes illustration, deleted scene excerpts, comparisons of Sherlock scripts against original Holmes stories, and myriad other goodies associated with the brainchild of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat that was conceived on a train trip. You find how they choose filming locations, how they devised Sherlock's escape at the end of season two, the e-mails shared when the show and later scripts were being devised, the story of the original 60-minute pilot and how it became a 90-minute film, and more Sherlock and John goodness (including why in this series it's first names and not last). There are some neat photos, too, including Benedict Cumberbatch with his (and Sherlock's) parents, and photos of Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller (the updated Sherlock Holmes in the U.S. in the series Elementary) alternating roles of the scientist and his creation in a stage production of Frankenstein.

Even the end papers are cool—it's the infamous "Sherlock wallpaper" that's been made so famous on the series so that it pops up on e-reader covers, bookcovers, cell phone protectors, textile patterns, etc. A must for Sherlock fans.

 C.S. Lewis & Narnia for Dummies, Richard Wagner
If you've always wondered what the Narnia books were really all about, this is a good primer to the most famous works of C.S. Lewis, made into both radio plays and television and theatrical films. The book opens with a brief history of Lewis, including the college years that drew him away from Christianity and the events in his life that drew him back, and then jumps into the seven Narnia children's novels, noting the novelists who influenced Lewis, the parallels with Christianity (but, as Wagner explains, not told as allegory; instead the Narnia books are a "supposal"), a who's who of characters, a list of themes, and summaries of all the books with Lewis' themes of sacrifice and faith pointed out.

The second half of the book is devoted to Lewis' other works, from the well-known Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, , the Space trilogy, and The Screwtape Letters, to the more obscure like Lewis' first work, an allegory called The Pilgrim's Regress, Till We Have Faces, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves, and The Abolition of Man. A list of authors favored by Lewis, print and internet resources, and two suggested biographies round out the book

Books Completed Since March 1

The bad thing about being sick for a while is...being sick. The good thing is you get to read a lot. The bad thing is that there are many books to review and little time. So excuse the brevity for some of these.

 Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, Charlotte Higgins
Great Britain has been invaded so many times that layer upon layer of different cultures have been spread upon the British countryside. Here author Higgins takes us on a tour of one of the oldest ones: the Romans who came to "Britannia" in the early years of the Common Era. Traveling in a rattly old camper van, Higgins and her partner travel from Kent and Essex, where the earliest Romans landed, to "Londinium" and then west into Wales, to Bath and its healthful waters first utilized by Romans, north to Hadrian's Wall (and the Antonine Wall, a Roman construction I'd never heard of), and up into Scotland, and finally to the east, investigating what is left of what were sizable settlements and forts.

I love archaeology, so having a book that combined ruins, Romans, and Britain was like tossing me in a museum and telling me to enjoy. Indeed I did! The writing was brisk and talked about the everyday life of the Roman inhabitants as well as political goings-on behind the scenes, as well as the landscapes settled by the invaders. The book is enhanced with line drawings of maps illustrating the sites she visits, and if you are interested in Roman exploration and settlement or Great Britain's past, this archaeological history should be your cup of British tea.

 Absolutely Truly, Heather Vogel Frederick
Truly Lovejoy's world has finally fallen into place. Her dad is leaving his Army career and the family has already moved to Austin, Texas, where he's accepted a job as a wrestling coach and now twelve-year-old Truly can pal around with her favorite cousin Mackenzie. Then disaster strikes: her father is caught in a bomb blast. He comes home alive, but minus one arm, his usually happy demeanor now sad and grim. He turns down the coach job, but is talked into moving the family to tiny, rural Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, to take over his parents' failing bookshop, which he will run with his nonconformist sister. Truly is unhappy over the move and losing her best friend/cousin, but most of all feeling she has "lost" her loving dad. Then, in cleaning up the store, Truly finds what may be a rare copy of Charlotte's Web. Is this a chance to help save Lovejoy's Books? But what's with the mysterious note inside?

I loved this book, top to toe: Truly herself, already almost six feet tall and awkward; her stoic father and hopeful mother, her four siblings (even the lisping one isn't over the top, as so many cute kids are), her offbeat aunt Truly, and the friends, both schoolmates and adults, Truly makes in Pumpkin Falls. Much of the "mystery" is more self-discovery, but I loved the combination of ex-military family with a problem, books, winter in New Hampshire, town traditions, even Truly's fascination with birds and how the family updates the bookstore.

The cover notes that this is "A Pumpkin Falls Mystery." I hope that means there will be further opportunities to visit the Lovejoys.

 The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, Kathryn Aalto
Imagine a chill, rainy March day. Then open up this book, which is a color-photograph-and-Ernest-Shepard-drawing combination with delicious descriptions of A.A. Milne's (and Christopher Robin's) life and the landscapes they explored. The sun comes out, not outside, but in your heart.

If you love nature, especially the English countryside, you will absolutely love this book, even if you have never read a word of Winnie-the-Pooh in your life. Any reference you need to the countryside being mentioned in the Pooh books are already mentioned in the text, and you can compare Ernest Shepard's whimsical watercolors to the real countryside, which he studied before illustrating the books, just as Garth Williams did before providing the illustrations for the "Little House" books. The pages are thick and glossy, showing off the beautiful photographs and prints to good effect. In the text, you learn of Milne's idyllic, vanished childhood, something children today can only dream about, and the ecology of each of the sites that served as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood.

It's not quite as good as a tramp through Christopher Robin's real enchanted world, but it will do for someone an ocean and a climate away. Relaxing your blood pressure has never been so wonderful.

 The Ghost Wind Stallion: A Kaya Mystery, Emma Carlson Berne
This is the best book of the new crop of three American Girl mysteries—but not as a mystery.

Kaya's blind sister Speaking Rain chafes at her disability. She is tired of having to be led around and treated as if she is going to break. Plus she's begun having dreams in which a beautiful silver horse comes to her. Kaya is troubled by her sister's restlessness, and by the visit of her newly widowed aunt, who seems to have taken an instant dislike to her. Then, while she and Speaking Rain are investigating the horse herd, they see what appears to be a fabled Ghost Wind stallion, descendants of Russian horses that washed ashore from a wreck in the Pacific. It is the horse Speaking Rain has been dreaming about, and she believes that he has come to her to be hers and set her free.

There is little mystery in the book (except for the disappearance of Tall Branch's horse), but the strength of this one is Speaking Rain's determination, Kaya's willingness to help her, and the bond between the two girls. Tall Branch's emotions after her husband's death and attitude toward Kaya is also handled sensitively. A great story about how people with disabilities often feel shunted off to the side and wish just to "fit in."

 The Glowing Heart: A Josefina Mystery, Valerie Tripp
It's Three Kings Day at the Montoya family rancho, and they've welcomed guests, included Don Javier, an old beau of Tia Dolores, who is now Josefina's stepmother. He has brought Tia Dolores a beautiful ruby ring which is an inheritance from her aunt. Also visiting is Senor Fernando, a man who is considering buying a horse from Josefina's father. During the festivities, the ruby ring disappears. Could Don Javier be the culprit? Senor Fernando? Or is it the strange man Josefina has seen hanging around near their hacienda? And why does Tia Dolores seem so dispirited? Can it be she regrets coming to the rancho and marrying Mr. Montoya?

I can't believe Valerie Tripp wrote this. It's so very obvious who the culprit is (think the Lost in Space episode "The Golden Man") and what happened to the ruby. And, maybe it's because I'm an adult, I also figured out why Tia Dolores was so unhappy from page 20. Just because the readers are kids doesn't mean you need to give them a storyline with cliched aspects. Disappointing.

 The Finders-Keepers Rule: A Maryellen Mystery, Jacqueline Dembar Greene
Of the three new American girl mysteries, this is the best mystery: Maryellen and her buddy Davy are walking on the beach when they find a barnacle-encrusted ring buried in the sand. Maryellen thinks it might be treasure from a ship that sank on the Florida coast, her mind full of pirates after seeing Walt Disney's new movie, Treasure Island. But the kids are really surprised when people start trying to get their hands on the ring.

This is actually a better Maryellen story than the original two books. Greene paints the idyllic 50s childhood in bright colors: trips to the beach with no helicopter parents, enjoying time with your best friend, and a reasonably complicated mystery for the kids to solve with a little frisson of danger that isn't too scary for the intended audience. The colorful Daytona Beach scene of the 1950s is also well portrayed, and the story touches on the serious subject of the ownership of artifacts. Not only is a Disney movie mentioned, but it could even be an old-fashioned Disney kids' mystery film like The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove. Glad to find a Maryellen story I finally enjoyed.

 My Very Good, Very Bad Dog, ed. by Amy Neumark
You know the drill: it's a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. There are funny stories and sad ones; stories of companionship, love, rescue, and memories. It's neither better nor worse than any of the other compilations. If you love heartwarming dog stories, this is for you.

 The Perils of Sherlock Holmes, Loren D. Estleman
This is a collection of short stories by Estleman, most crossovers with historical characters like Sir Richard Burton, Doc Holliday, and author Sax Rohmer, plus there is another story where Holmes is consulted by an earl who turns out to be "Tiny Tim"othy Cratchit. Plus there's an essay about the essential presence of Watson. The stories are interesting, but nothing spectacular.

 The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson
At last Anderson (and Harper & Row) have wrung their last out of LIW.

Seriously. He admits it in the introduction

I don't mean to be so flip. There is some meat to this newest collection of Wilder letters, including some of the letters she and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane shared about the editing of the "Little House" books. Sadly, Rose burned most of the letters, especially all those from the 1940s, so we will never know the full editorial partnership she shared with her mother. There is a really good, impassioned letter of Laura's insisting that The Long Winter be confined to the Ingalls and Wilders with a few supporting characters rather than a full pallet of townspeople as Rose wanted in order to give full import of the isolation families faced during that hard winter of 1880-1881, which showed she did have the flair for storytelling that some literary scholars have denied her. But most of the letters are banal little responses to schoolchildren, with a few lovely gems.

The trouble is, I've read so many books about Wilder, including the recently published Pioneer Girl, that I've already seen many of these "surprise bits" (like the fact that a young couple and their baby lived with the family during the long winter), so the revelations aren't. It's also sad to read Wilder's last letters with her longing for her late husband clear even in the few paragraphs, and it's also obvious that the sisters did not remain very close after Ma and Pa and Mary died.

I've been a Laura "junkie" since I first saw the television series and wanted to know "the real story," so I'm glad I picked this up, but if you have less of an attachment to her, I would invest in one of the biographies instead.

 Letters of E.B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth
This is a thick collection of White's letters from schoolboy missives written to his brothers and parents all the way through a final letter to his stepson in the mid-70s. The most fascinating are those written from a cross country trip he took with a friend when he was in his late teens. They bought an old car and drove cross-country, stopping to get work as they needed money; White learned that he really didn't want to have anything to do with advertising very early. Later his letters chronicle his employment with the "New Yorker," his courtship and marriage to Katharine Angell, and the family's move out to the Maine farm.

This book is worth it solely for this memo.

  The Happy Hollisters at Circus Island, Jerry West
One of the most fun children's series of the 1950s was this multiple-book collection about the Hollister family: Dad owns a store called The Trading Post and, of course, Mom stays at home supervising her active brood: the two elder, more responsible children Pete and Pam, then mischievous Ricky and sparkling Holly, and finally little Sue, who's only four, plus Zip the collie and White Nose and her kittens (which stay kittens for the duration of the books) and the pet donkey, Domingo. Their young parents were always happy to get involved in the kids' activities, and this time Dad Hollister precipitates the adventure when he takes the family down to Florida for winter vacation to a place called Circus Island, where a wintering show called the Sunshine Circus appears to be plagued with bad luck. Before they leave, Zip is injured after a dog show, having chased after a kidnapped poodle. The children find that whomever stole the poodle appears to be heading south toward Circus Island as well!

These are great, simple, fun books with easy vocabularies. The kids are loved and cared for, but never stifled by overprotective parents. They have adventures, use their minds to solve puzzles, and enjoy themselves enormously while helping others. No rude jokes in sight and the action is always lively. There are some mild 1950s female stereotypes, but the Hollister girls are just as active as the boys, so even if they are pigeonholed a little, you have no doubt Pam can grow up to be a businesswoman just as easily as a mother, and Holly could become a veterinarian as well as a nurse.

 Wait for Signs, Craig Johnson
This is a collection of Walt Longmire short stories, some with a Christmas theme, that Johnson has written over the years for his fans, ranging from the ultimately funny "Old Indian Trick" to the adventure "Messenger," in which Walt, Vic, and Henry try to rescue an owl from its precarious nest in a Porta-Potty. Walt is also mistaken for the Messiah, takes a cue from his cameo appearance in A Christmas Carol, and shares a bittersweet Thanksgiving Day at the Red Pony, and there's even an adventure with a renegade sheep.

Obviously these stories would be most liked by fans of the Longmire mysteries, but they are equally good as stand-alone character studies.

 360 Degrees Longitude: One Family's Journey Around the World, John Higham
From when their two children were small, John and September Higham promised that once the kids were old enough, the family would take a year off and bicycle around the world. When Katrina turned eleven and Jordan turned eight, the Highams kept that promise.

Well, sort of. They did travel around the world, but the tandem bicycle idea had to be abandoned in Switzerland in the first few weeks of the trip after Katrina broke her leg while using a climbing wall. Higham ended up carrying her around Europe for many weeks until her leg healed, and then eventually the tandem bike idea was abandoned. In the meantime, the Highams learned to get along with many modern conveniences and having wild adventures, including driving over a flooded dry salt lake and hiking the entire Inca trail. They encounter bureaucrats, lifesavers, the frantic traffic of Cambodia, altitude sickness, and other adventures. The kids, of course, finally rebel at museums, yet find something to take to heart in each place, whether it be kinship with the children of Hiroshima or the victims of Auschwitz.

I enjoyed this book, but I wish Higham would have concentrated more on what they saw and not his funny little foibles along the way. Sometimes it's almost too lighthearted, a circumnavigation in the style of Cheaper by the Dozen. I would have liked more beautiful or awesome moments. Still, it's a quick-moving, fun narrative.

 Re-read: The Horsemasters, Don Stanford
A comfort read if there every was one. College-age Dinah Wilcox wants to go to the same expensive college as her best friend Bee-Bye Simms, but knows her parents' budget won't extend that far. She has talked the Dean of the college into letting her work her way through college as an Assistant Riding Mistress (I guess it's one of those toney schools that has horseback riding) if she gets a Preliminary Instructor's Certificate from the British Horse Society, using a gift of a thousand dollars from her grandmother to attend the "Horsemasters" class. This is the story of how Dinah goes from being a mediocre rider to an excellent one over the course of a summer, studying with fourteen other boys and girls from all nations in a course that includes dressage, jumping, cross-country, elementary veterinary medicine, and the innumerable other pieces of knowledge that separate a horse rider from a horse owner.

The majority of horse-crazy adolescent girls grow up in a pink cloud of fantasy about horses, imagining an hour of horse cleaning and grooming and then endless hours of riding over rainbow-stretched misty fields. This book shows you not only how difficult it is to properly care for a horse, but does it in such a fine state of storytelling that you learn many things without even trying (what's "lampas," a mouth infection, for instance; how to treat colic; how hard it is to keep a horse in top condition) while having fun with the fourteen characters, including Enzo, the flirty Italian boy; Jill, the Scots girl who'll give up anything but her bacon; Adrienne, a rich Swiss girl who's never done such hard work in her life, Roger, a farm boy; and our dogged heroine Dinah, who doesn't think she'll ever catch up with the rest of the students, not to mention the adults: Mercy Hale, the hard-as-nails "Head Girl" and Major Brooke and Lieutenant Pinski, the riding instructors. (There is a wonderful scene in the riding school with Lieutenant Pinski!)

You will gallop through this book as fast as Dinah on her horse Cornish Pastie...I promise!

 Doctor Who: The Doctor's Life and Times, James Goss & Steve Tribe
This is a nifty coffee-table type scrapbook/fact book about the complete series as it existed up to the 50th anniversary episode, from Hartnell to Smith, divided by Doctor. For each reincarnation, there's a "scrapbook" devoted to that Doctor, with publicity photos and behind the scenes snaps along with a narrative written for each Doctor: Susan's diary and the Doctor's diary for the first Doctor; an interview with Jackie Tyler for the Ninth; a dialog between the Doctor and the Master for the Third, etc. Following each scrapbook section are that are short commentaries by the people involved  with that Doctor, from William Russell, Waris Hussein, and Carole Ann Ford to Karen Gillan, Jenna Coleman, and Arthur Darvill; from original producer Verity Lambert all the way to Steven Moffat. Who fans will enjoy.

 Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, Kitty Burns Florey
We were away for the weekend and the hotel we stayed at has a bookcase with books you could borrow to read and then return to any hotel in that chain. They had, believe it or not, two copies of this book. It's a nice, easy to read history of handwriting, the first portion taking us back to rune inscriptions, wax tablets and cuneiform, hieroglyphics and papyrus, and then Roman lettering and its different forms (uncial, Carolinian, etc.), but the main focus of the book is on the different styles of handwriting that spanned the history of the United States, from the ornate Spencerian script to the swirling cursive of the Palmer method to the simplified cursive of the 1950s and thus to the present. Very lively and enjoyable, although I could have done without the chapter on graphologists and their feuds.

 A Summer to Die, Lois Lowry
This is one of Lowry's early classics, the story of Meg Chalmers, a girl who thinks herself an ugly duckling compared against her prettier sister Molly. Meg, a budding photographer, is just coming into her own at school with some courses she will love when her parents move the family to the country so her professor father can finish his book. At school Molly immediately charms everyone and Meg feels left out in the cold until she befriends her elderly bachelor neighbor who is also into photography and his two tenants, a "hippie" couple who don't appear to be married. But as her friendships develop, her tenuous relationship with her sister actually starts to fail further as Molly's strange "winter nosebleeds" become worse and she is often tired or in pain from headaches. It is only when Molly wakes Meg up one night, drenched in blood, that Meg realizes that there is something far more wrong with her sister than she expected.

This is a sad story about a serious subject, but well told, the first in a spate of serious books that came out in the late 70s about seriously ill young people and how they and their families coped with that illness. It was also Lowry's first book and based on a true experience. I wasn't sure I wanted to read this, but Lowry grabbed me from the first paragraph with eyeglassed, bookworm Meg and her feelings of inadequacy, and I ended up really enjoying it.

 The Dust Bowl, Albert Marrin
This is an outstanding older-child's picture book about the Dust Bowl that starts with a history of the Great Plains and why the climate was not conducive for farming, yet it was settled and farmed anyway. Good rains in the early part of the 20th century lulled the settlers into thinking the rich soil would always provide bumper crops and prices would always be high. However, because they used the farming methods more suited to wetter climes, with fine harrowing of the soil, the constant high winds and the drought of the 1930s blew the topsoil away, creating "black blizzards" and giving both adults and children "dust pneumonia."

Many of the classic "Dust Bowl" photographs of Dorothea Lange are here, including the iconic "Migrant Mother" (another side of the story of that photograph is told), and an excellent narrative conveys the entire span of the story, including the prospect for future dust bowls in China and India. Because of photographs of children in distress, this is not recommended for younger kids.

 Lanterns and Lances, James Thurber
If you're just starting on reading James Thurber, I suggest you start with his early and classic writing: buy a copy of The Thurber Carnival, which includes a selection of the cartoons, all of My Life and Hard Times, and then a great selection of his classics, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "The Catbird Seat." If you're an old-time radio fan, look for The Beast in Me and Other Animals, which contains Thurber's humorous study of radio "daytime dramas," "Soapland."

This collection is from Thurber's later period. It's not that he "lost it," but his essays and humor are increasingly dark as his blindness and aging cynicism caught up with him. There's still much to like here: "How to Get Through the Day," for example, a commentary about a Thurber favorite Henry James (which unfortunately digresses into a criticism of television Westerns), and a diatribe on the creeping "You Know" in speech. Several of the essays, "The Tyranny of Trivia" and "The Watchers of the Night," involve insomnia and the word games played to work through it. Cocktail parties and inane conversations at such also occupy several of the pieces. If it all seems a bit dry and cynical, go find the stories from his prime instead.

 Walking the Bible, Bruce Feiler
This was my Lenten reading, the story of Feiler's journey through the Holy Land as it says in the subtitle states "A Journal by Land Through the Five Books of Moses." A journey by automobile and by camel, by foot and by other means of transportation, with his scholar and guide Avner Goren, a Jewish scholar and teacher.

I loved this book because it made me feel as if I were truly there exploring the route with Feiler and Goren: the crowded cities, the bedouin tents, the endless sand, the towering cliffs of Petra, the shores of the Red Sea. Feiler talks to Christians on pilgrimage, Jewish scholars and everyday Muslims, city dwellers and what is left of nomadic peoples—all of them with one thing in common: they have felt the call of the spiritual in the desert. The narrative is well-paced and even when descriptive doesn't get bogged down in itself; I particularly enjoyed Feiler's poetic descriptions.

 Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses, published by Paul Hamlyn Ltd.
When I was about ten or so, I found a thin, large format book on a remainder pile (I recall it being in Woolworth's). The cover was gone and we got it for a few dollars. This was my beloved Dogs, Dogs, Dogs, Dogs, an illustrated anthology of fiction and essays by Paul Hamlyn Ltd. I loved that book to death and only later found out what the cover looked like.

What should I find in a used bookstore a few weeks back but the companion book Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses, which is a collection of essays ("The Horse in History," "The Horse in Art," "The Horse in Sport," etc.),  interrupted by a few cartoons and fiction, plus black and white and color illustrations, including, I was delighted to discover, two photographs of "Nautical," a temperamental but famous jumping horse once profiled in one of my favorite Walt Disney short subjects, "The Horse With the Flying Tail." Once again, no cover, but who cared? (This is the cover.)

There is a Cats, Cats, Cats, Cats, too, but if I go as long between finding it as I did this one, I fear I won't be here to do so. :-) (Oh, gosh, there's a Birds, Birds, Birds, Birds, too...)

 Murder on the Last Frontier, Cathy Pegau
Charlotte Brody has left the stifling society of 1919 Yonkers behind her to join her brother Michael in Cordova, Alaska, America's "last frontier," where he is practicing medicine. A suffragette and journalist, Charlotte hopes to get a new start as well as write some provacative prose for "The Modern Woman's Review." As soon as she arrives in town, though, she discovers that not only has her brother been harboring a secret, but that human nature is not very different in this small town: soon a brutal murder occurs.

I am on the fence about this book, but realize I will probably buy the next one. I still like the characters, and a "modern girl" in still-frontier Alaska is very appealing. The rough-and-tumble of an Alaskan town post-WWI is well described. Trouble is, Charlotte is almost too headstrong. She wears her heart (and her suspicions) on her sleeve and deliberately endangers herself and others in the process. For someone who has been working for a while as a reporter, she is regrettably blunt and has no "reporter savvy." Plus big portions of the mystery are practically broadcast. When a certain event happens, for instance, you immediately realize Charlotte's other reason for coming to Cordova. The culprit is pretty obvious as the plot jogs along, and the romantic storyline developed way too quickly for my taste.

My biggest irritation with this book is the modernisms that creep into the narrative. "Pants"? "Lifestyle"? And in the preview of the sequel, a referral to an "op-ed" piece? Really? Plus some of the dialog is clunky; when Michael and Charlotte have a heart-to-heart near the end, lines include "I think we've learned valuable lessons here" and "We can help each other find peace now." Oh, good grief. I don't expect this to be written with quaint postwar prose, but the modern vocabulary really tosses one out of the story.

But...Alaska. Female journalist. One who opposes the Volstead Act to boot. I'll buy the next, but I hope Pegau tightens up her writing. Please?

 Freedom Just Around the Corner, Walter A. McDougall
This history of the colonial and then pre-James Polk United States is billed as a history of "the brave, brilliant, and flawed people who made America great...native-born and immigrant: German, Latin, African, and British; farmers, engineers, planters and merchants; Protestants, Freemasons, Catholics, and Jews...and the American scofflaws, speculators, rogues, and demagogues." And that's when it's at its best, talking about those little people who made up the US: teamsters, the rare woman planters like Caty Greene, pioneers, those who bucked the system and moved west, the Native Americans, etc. But, of course, to do a proper history, one has to get through the political machinations as well, and there you will find this volume harking back to a normal social studies book. So I pretty much read through it in fits and starts, dozing over the politics until they got back to the individual experiences of the individuals. There are some great pieces on Catherine "Caty" Green, the unconventional widow of General Nathaniel Greene, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the southern planters vs. the northern farmers, etc. Plus McDougall profiles each of the states that entered the union following the revolution through 1848.