reviews

H is for Healing and Hardship Author: Helen Mcdonald With unanimous agreement, my book club long ago selected our July pick – Helen McDonald’s non-fiction mélange of hawk raising and recovering from the grief of losing her father, H is for Hawk. With a string of accolades and awards ranging from Oprah to the Washington Post, all the buzz this year has centered on this eccentric story of a lonely woman, the vastness of loss, and the violence of nature.  Starting the narrative with a wide spectrum of nature’s beauty and the odd foreboding of impending loss, which soon comes [...]

A Somber Little House Story: Winter Blizzards and Starvation Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder The sixth book in the Little House on the Prairie series, The Long Winter is hard to forget. Remaining a favorite of mine through multiple readings from my childhood until now, the cozy homespun nature of the series combines with a gripping and tense narrative. Weaving in fewer elements of fiction, Laura tells the story mostly as it was including moments of near-starvation, extreme deprivation, desperation, and all-out transformative defeat. In the ruthlessly hot August of 1880 far out in the Dakota Territory, Laura is now 14 [...]

Truth and Consequences Author: Erika Johansen Warning: The Invasion of the Tearling is a series book!  So if you have not read Queen of the Tearling, go back and start there.  If you try to read this first, you’ll be hopelessly lost. Kelsea has transformed from a country girl into a queen as we re-enter Erika Johansen’s brilliant dystopian fantasy world at the beginning of The Invasion of the Tearling.  At the end of book one - The Queen of the Tearling - the very young, very new queen abruptly ended a longstanding arrangement with the neighboring kingdom of Mortmesme.  [...]