Niall Williams, born in Dublin, and Christine Breen, born in New York and educated in Boston and Dublin, decided to leave New York City for her ancestral home in Kiltumper in rural Ireland when they were in their twenties. In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden, written together, is set thirty-five years later after they have raised a family and grown accustomed to the rhythms of their writing and gardening habits.

I’ll continue with Shakespeare’s order of the seasons of life – at least as long as it suits me. He pictures a sighing male in love singing a ballad toward his girl’s beautiful eyebrow. It didn’t happen exactly like that for me, though there was music involved.

I seldom begin a book review by mentioning front matter, but author/illustrator Don Tate’s dedication of Pigskins to Paintbrushes to his “friends at Highlights where this story began” includes strong supporters of children’s literature and inclusion in all its aspects in the Highlights team. This book fits naturally into the same frame.

Let’s hear it for lefties! August 13 has been designated as left-handed day. I am not one myself, but some of my favorite people are – including one sister, one brother-in-law, and one son.

Reinhard Friedl begins his book, The Source of All Things: A Heart Surgeon’s Quest to Understand Our Most Mysterious Organ, from the vantage point of his life as a heart surgeon in Germany.

For my next season of life, I will follow Shakespeare’s order, but not his view. He has a whining schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school. My schooldays began at Hardy Station, Mississippi with Daddy as the principal of the six-grade rural school as well as pastor of the Baptist Church.

Too many “bests” about a book make me a little suspicious about a promotion campaign, and there are plenty of people who have described The Spy and the Traitor with that adjective. However, when my oldest son, who loves spy novels, applied the word to this narrative nonfiction by Ben Macintyre, I had to check it out.

The concept of life’s seasons seems to keep popping up lately, including the new theme for the adult ladies’ Sunday school class that I teach. It’s an old discussion brought up in Ecclesiastes with “To everything there is a season . . . a time to be born, and a time to die.”

In a delightful picture book, Leda Schubert writes Nathan’s Song, a story inspired by her grandfather. Nathan loves to sing from the time he is small. By the time he is sixteen, his parents decide he needs to study in Italy where the best singers are.

The excitement started midmorning when I discovered a red wasp hovering around the porch rocker where I intended to sit to have a phone chat with my sister. Not wanting to share the space with a likely biter, I got the fly swatter.

Books can be inspirational, educational, and thought-provoking. All of that is good, but sometimes a reader needs to dive into one, knowing the value is just entertainment. When I saw David Baldacci’s new book Daylight on Net Galley’s list, I knew that was exactly what was in store, and I was ready.

When I hear an idea from divergent sources within a few days, I consider it a sign that I might need to think about it. The first time I heard it involved Simone Biles’s competition at the Olympic trials.

The War Nurse, Tracey Enerson Wood’s new historical fiction novel based on a true story set during World War I, reads like a memoir with the protagonist as the narrator. Early in her life, Julia Stimson encounters prejudice that will follow her intermittently as long as she lives.

A recent trip with our daughter and son-in-law to the Mississippi Agricultural Museum brought back memories – some fond and some not so fond. I think maybe that’s the purpose of museums.

Bears or Wolves – take your choice. In March 1944 in the Ukraine, Emil and Adeline Martel and their extended family must decide whether they will wait for the Soviet bear’s incursion or follow the wolves – Nazi’s who have promised to protect pureblooded Germans and lead them to safety.

Stress coming from happy days after a siege of dark ones brings one of life’s peculiarities. Difficult adjustments often accompany change even when it is for the better.

After reading Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls, I knew to jump at the chance offered by Net Galley to read an ARC of her new book The Woman They Could Not Silence.

At the recent JambaLAya conference, Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park used a fairly common activity to illustrate her point that writers should not drive their readers crazy by getting things wrong when they write outside their area of familiarity.

The backstory of the book, Seeing the Elephant by Virginia Howard, formed my Friday blog. Frank Reaugh, renowned artist and teacher, took three ladies and three of his teenaged students including Virginia’s mother and namesake aunt on a two-month excursion to see the newly opened Grand Canyon. The book is based on the diary kept by the aunt.

A couple of decades ago, one Virginia (Virginia Howard) sat next to another (me) in New Orleans at a meeting of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. In our small talk, she told me of a book she had been yearning to write.