Books Completed in May 2026

 Merry Hall, Beverley Nichols
Picked this up at a book sale; it's supposed to be a classic of "gardening literature." Why, since I hate the thought of gardening with all the loathing of my soul?

Well, because I love gardens, and English ones at that, and Nichols, a noted British playwright, writer, and, apparently, someone of a gadfly, was known to love gardening. As this begins, he had sold a previous estate where he had a garden and buys, imprudently per his friend Bob, a run-down country house with room for a traditional English garden. It's kept, now that the owner has passed, by the imperious Oldfield, who Nichols finds a superb gardener, if often disapproving, and, with Oldfield's help, Nichols works to turn "Merry Hall" into his dream English estate/garden, despite the criticisms of his neighbor Miss Emily and a floral "designer" named Rose who Nichols despises.

While his indispensable butler takes care of the renovation of the inside, with the soothing presence of the cats "One" and "Four," we follow the adventure of Nichols in trying to create his dream garden. It's very funny and old-fashioned and I'd love to read the sequels some day if I could find them cheap.

 Deadly Heat, Richard Castle
In the previous book, Frozen Heat, New York City detective Nikki Heat (who out-Mary Sues SVU's Olivia Benson), received more clues to the mysterious death of her mother, and in this fifth book in "Castle's" Nikki Heat series, she and her lover Jameson Rook (Rook = Castle, get it?), Pulitzer-Prize-winning magazine journalist, hunt down fresh clues. But there's a new threat in town, a serial killer who's definitely after Heat's attention—if not after her life! What with threats from the past and a new one about a biological threat to the city, it's pretty busy even for the perpetual motion team of Heat and Rook.

The Nikki Heat books are Castle stories under a different name and a couple of tweaks. Kate Beckett = sexy Nikki Heat, Castle = Jameson Rook, Ryan and Esposito = Raley and Ochoa, Laney Parish = Lauren Parry. Rook's mom is an actress; changes: no Alexis, and Captain "Montrose" has been replaced by the ineffective Captain Irons. Castle fans will probably enjoy, but they're written so that even a person who's never seen the series can follow.

(Oh, once again the two detectives Malcolm and Reynolds are featured! And, thank goodness, an annoying regular character is disposed of!)

 Brave Companions, David McCullough
This is a collection of essays McCullough wrote for various history magazines about the famous and infamous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt, artist Frederic Remington—and those who were once household names, like Louis Agassiz and the Roeblings (builders of the Brooklyn Bridge), and those not familiar: Henry Caudhill, Miriam Rothschild, David Plowden. There are even a couple of essays about places, like Washington DC, and even one about a clock.

David McCullough is always good reading, and I can hear his voice when he writes. Enough said. Go read!

 The New Girl: First Crush, Cassandra Calin
This is Calin's graphic novel sequel to The New Girl, which I enjoyed so much.

Christmas vacation is over, and Lia Lordache is back to school, juggling learning French so she can pass "Welcome Class," reuniting with her group of friends in the class, and dealing with her crush on Julien, the blue-eyed boy from the school magazine to which Lia contributes. At the end of The New Girl, it was left hanging that someone had a crush on Lia, but had not found the courage to tell her. That all comes to fruition in this sequel, in which Lia really makes a mess of things several times, but also manages to have good times, such as during the winter activity period where she and her friends learn to ice skate.

I so love Lia. She's so me, always putting her foot in her mouth and saying the wrong thing, and I so get her horrible troubles with her period. In this volume, Lia's mom even takes her to see a doctor about her terrible cramps and nausea, and the doctor basically just says it's very early in her period yet, and it may "settle down," then writes a prescription for what's basically over the counter pain meds (that don't work). I wanted to smack him.

  Re-read: Fannie's Last Supper, Christopher Kimball
I hate to cook, but there was nothing better that I liked than to read Christopher Kimball's column that used to run in each issue of Cooks Illustrated. His articles about Vermont always put me in mind of Gladys Taber.

In this book, Kimball has brought his desire to cook a 12-course dinner from the original Fannie Farmer cookbook to life. We follow Kimball and his assistants as they plan the meal and attempt—as closely as possible—to cook it in period style. Of course (if you're familiar with Cooks, you know they always change recipes to improve flavor), Kimball and the Cooks folks play with the recipes and actually reject some of them for not being all that tasty. This has apparently disturbed some of the folks who read this book, and it is a bit ironic that Kimball wrote a book about cooking à la Farmer and then did not follow her recipes precisely, but instead used better-tasting ones from other chefs. But since I have no interest in the actual cooking part and just read this for the historical perspective on cooking, I quite enjoyed the narrative as a whole. The revelations about cooking over the wood stove were especially "eye-opening." I knew they made the kitchen hot, but I never imagined things melted!

Warning: the chapter about the calves' brains may be a bit much for the modern person who gets everything packaged in plastic.

 Meet Claudie and Adventures With Claudie, Brit Bennett
I've grouped these together because they form a whole novel in that way. Claudie Wells is growing up in New York City's Harlem during the 1920's Harlem Renaissance, where jazz musicians and poets and painters are flourishing, yet she and her family and friends are restricted by societal bigotry. In the first book, Claudie discovers Miss Amelia, who owns the boardinghouse the Wells family lives in, is behind in the rent and they may all be evicted. She decides to organize a variety show as a "rent party" to make up the difference. In the sequel, Claudie takes time off to travel to her mother's home town in Georgia with Mrs. Wells and her cousin Sidney to meet her grandmother and cousins for the first time. Here she learns some hard truths about "sundown towns," white bigotry, and fighting back.

And, upon returning to Harlem, will Claudie's variety show succeed and save Miss Amelia's boardinghouse?

I was impressed that they addressed lynchings—subtly so not to terrify kids, but not to whitewash them, either—and other things like sundown towns and bullying by white racists. I'm also glad they're including the historical notes at the back of the books again, too!

 Erased, Anna Malaka Tubbs
This is Tubbs' examination of how the patriarchy has negatively affected the lives of women—chiefly minority women, but in truth women of all races—from self-respect down to medical decisions about women's bodies.

I enjoyed reading this and nodded a lot in agreement so much, especially when she talks about medical decisions (so much of that made my blood boil), but it would have been a much better book if she had not kept summarizing what was written in previous chapters in the next chapter. It was as if it was written as a doctoral thesis, where these summaries are standard. I don't believe your average reader needed them.

 The Lily of Ludgate Hill, Mimi Matthews
This is the third book in Matthews' quartet of "The Belles of London," a group of four young women who are also equestriennes. This time the story centers around Lady Anne Deveril, whose only emotional attachments seem to be to her horse Saffron, and her mother, who has been in mourning for ten years, consults spiritualists, and doesn't show signs of stopping any time soon. Anne lives in mourning with her mother, but is worried about her friend Julia Wychwood (her story is told in Belle of Belgrave Square). So she reluctantly enlists the aid of "Hart," Felix Hartwood, the man who would have married her if she was not so attached at the hip to her mother, to escort the two of them to check on Julia.

Gradually, during the trip to Yorkshire, and then later when Anne and her mother are driven out of their home by a cousin, their long-dormant romance seems to be reviving.

The grief theme adds an extra texture to this story that others lack.

 Raquel Reyes Saves the Wedding, Angela Cervantes
Raquel is American Girl's "Girl of the Year" for 2026. She lives in Kansas City with her parents, who run a paleta shop (paletas are "a Mexican ice pop made from fresh fruits, natural ingredients, and creamy bases"), but they have traveled east for the wedding of Raquel's cousin Harper, a marine biologist. Raquel loves being a DJ and her skill proves a boon later in the book. She and her favorite cousin Sloan, who's acting a bit distant this summer, also participate in a pickleball tournament and help save a beached dolphin.

The big "catch" in this book is that Raquel is the great-great granddaughter of Samantha Parkington; her Grandma Meg remembers Samantha and they have kept Grandmary's house in Mount Bedford in the family. Raquel even finds Samantha's diary in the old house, all setting the stage for a novel about an adult Samantha being released in October 2026.

It's an enjoyable book, but almost too much plot is piled into one little book! 

 How the Post Office Created America, Winifred Gallagher
This is a mostly cut-and-dried, statistic-dotted narrative of the post office and how it not only delivered letters and parcels, but was part of the network that tied the thirteen colonies together and contributed to the cause of working for independence. Early on, newspapers were delivered for a rock-bottom price, so via those newspapers the arguments for liberty were circulated from New Hampshire to South Carolina.

Of course, emphasized is the terrible state of American roads, which continued for years, and the hardships of the carriers. Even into the 1920s mail wagons (and other goods-carrying vehicles) could be mired up to the axle after it rained. At first the mail was only delivered in cities, but the development of RFD (Rural Free Delivery) brought it to everyone, and when the mail-order catalogs came about, consumerism rose. Plus the fact that everyone seems to "know," but isn't true: the Pony Express was never part of the Unite States Post Office (and it only lasted 18 months, until the transcontinental railroad was finished). The rider that used to be the symbol of the US postal system (until the collapse of the Post Office in the 1960s, to be replaced by the Postal Service, which is a contacted service) was never a Pony Express rider; he went back to the original post riders that existed back to colonial times.

 The Hidden City, Charles Finch
I haven't read a Charles Lenox mystery in five years (since the last book), and I can't tell you how I enjoyed it! In this outing, Lenox is still in pain from the knife attack and subsequent infection he incurred in the United States, although the wound is ostensibly healed. Then a mystery ends up in his lap: his previous housekeeper, retired now, fears that an old murder that happened in the home she now rents may be having repercussions for her.

In addition, Lenox's dear cousin Jasper has died in India, and the family—his wife Lady Jane and their two daughters, Sophia and Clara—are awaiting the arrival of Jasper's 20-year-old daughter Angela and her companion, an Indian girl named Sari, both of whom will cause excitement in the household as the season proceeds from a cold autumn to Christmas.

I was so happy to be back in this universe. I had a rocky start with this series, but came to love it. This had an equally intriguing plot.

 American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, Isaac Fitzgerald
I'm so on the fence about this book. I enjoyed all the historical input about John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), as I grew up on the Disney cartoon and at least two episodes of Lassie that concerned trees supposedly planted by the man, as well as about Swedenborg and his religious beliefs, and enjoy Fitzgerald's encounters with the many people he meets on his travels (he doesn't walk the whole way as is rather implied by the cover; don't buy this if that fact disappoints you), and even most of his stays with friends.

I just have trouble getting past the drug use and drinking that is part of Fitzgerald's life. I understand it; his childhood was very fractured and I'm not surprised he chose ways of escaping. But according to his narrative, at the time he "followed the trail" he had a fiance and was sort of on friendly terms with his parents, so I don't see the need for him to be passing out drunk or stoned.

Warning that there is a very serious event at the end of the book after he's concluded his "walk."

 An Obvious Fact, Craig Johnson
Tenth book in Johnson's Longmire series (he's writing them faster than I can read them). Ever wonder about the person Henry Standing Bear named his classic 1969 Thunderbird after? Well, here you find out, as Walt and Henry travel to Hulett, Wyoming, at the foot of Devil's Tower, for Henry to participate in the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally—and, oh, yeah, Walt's looking into a suspicious motorcycle accident that left a young man in a coma. It's a clash of motorcycle fanatics, smuggled items that has the ATF prowling the countryside, a force of nature named Lola Wojciechowski, the return of Vic Moretti, and the trio of Walt, Henry, and, of course, Dog, and a page-turner at that. Any Longmire that has more Henry is fine with me. Enjoy!