
I’m not sure what happened with this one. It was a great one for setting–Frazier gives us some fabulous descriptions of North Carolina. And it’s not just the area around Cold Mountain itself–Inman walks away from the hospital where he is recovering, across much of the state. But I lost interest in the story pretty […]

Wow! This is a wonderful book that evokes all the senses and immerses us in the North Carolina mountains of 1939. There are birds–with calls and local names–there are flowers and herbs, there are trees and loggers riding them downriver. There are descriptions of traditional crafts–woodworking, weaving and spinning–as well as day-to-day facts of life […]

I recently started listening on Audible to Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and discovered the salt water marshes along the North Carolina coast. So far, this is an entrancing listen, and the wonderful descriptions of the marshes make me wish I had a hard copy of the book so I could share some […]

BIRDS! Finally, after a bit of a drought, we have birds! The very first paragraphs of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers include some wonderful descriptions of the sandhill cranes that migrate through Nebraska each year, stopping along the Platte River, and feeding on the remains of the harvested field corn and soybeans. They float […]
When most people think of Kansas, we tend to think, “flat.” And, after all, in Dorothy Must Die, author Danielle Paige called the Kansas town Flat Hill. I’ve already talked a bit about the Wizard of Oz movie and book (mis)perceptions of Kansas (including that Baum’s original descriptions were based on his unhappy experiences of […]