No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A. Kendra Greene

Posted on January 31, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Astonishingly imaginative, wise, and weird, the essays in this illustrated collection–featuring natural phenomena, children, death, and costuming–have the power to reshape the way one sees the world.


A. Kendra Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) offers a magical, mind-expanding selection of observations in No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Greene employs a delightful, often childlike wonder in this collection about discovery–where she interacts with others, where humans interact with the rest of the world, and what might be made of all of it. Greene’s perspective is fresh and inventive, open to all possibilities, and the results are surprising and wondrous.

Greene’s essays vary in length and take place around the world. “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” considers a crime: in 1979, a museum visitor stole a specimen of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Greene, who has been a museum visitor as well as a museum worker and a teacher, explores this act from several angles; unexpectedly, she empathizes deeply with the thief she calls “Visitor X.” “Until It Pops” details a dress made for the author out of balloons, and her experience of traveling to Chicago for Twist and Shout (the annual balloon twisters’ convention).

Brief and spellbinding, “The Two Times You Meet the Devil” describes encounters on a country road in Argentina and in a bookstore of unnamed location, respectively. “The more I think about it, the more I wonder how many times we have met, crossed paths at least, exchanged a look, and the devil has said nothing.” “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” is about death, as well as rocks, valleys, turf houses, forgetting, stick-shift cars, whales, kayaks, summer staff, television, and metaphor. “People Lie to Giraffe” is about real giraffes (one in particular) as well as the likeness of a giraffe suggested by a photo of the author’s long arm and pinched fingers. It explores everything encompassed in a child’s imagination, how to make the world, and what it means to tell the truth or tell a story.

Greene is always present, participating in the action and dialogue, postulating philosophies and understandings. Greene is an artist in several media (book arts, photography, illustration), and a teacher as well as a writer; this collection is illuminated by her own illustrations and images. The scope of her essays (26 in total) is mesmerizing, her language glittering, and her ideas exuberant and profound. She says it best herself: “It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world.” As for what we communicate with art: “everything resonant and whole and shining, all at once, perfect, every bell ringing, yes.” Yes.

This review originally ran in the January 27, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 sprays of bougainvillea.

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Highland Outdoors magazine

Posted on January 13, 2025 by pagesofjulia

When I looked, I was a bit surprised to see that I’ve not written before about this high-quality, locally-produced magazine. Highland Outdoors is regional in its focus as “West Virginia’s outdoor magazine,” but its contents will interest those further abroad; I’ve bought gift subscriptions for friends and family in Texas and Washington state who have appreciated it. And while you can buy subscriptions – and I do, to support such a great product – it’s available for free on a number of stands in local businesses, as well as on the website above. I appreciate that free availability and am glad to pay my way to help make that possible.

I love everything about this production. Large-format, glossy, sustainably printed, with well-written and -edited articles and really great photography (the publisher and editor-in-chief is a photographer), this is the first magazine that’s ever inspired me to read even all the ads: I appreciate knowing who the local businesses are who support the mag, and figure some of them might actually interest me, and I appreciate the design that goes into arranging those ads (they tend to be grouped by location, so that businesses in the same town cluster together, and often near an article that refers to that same town, etc.). It’s just a gorgeous product…

and I and my friends love the local/regional nature of the content. It feels really good to sink into a place and a people that you know well, or are trying to know better. It’s a joy to read about (or read words written by) people we know a little, and get to know them better that way. In the words of a friend of mine (also a subscriber), it’s a great insight and way to engage more deeply with our community. I’ve loved reading about strong women like Cassie Smith (league director of WVICL, our state’s NICA chapter) and Vicky Weeks (Leadville finisher and regular competitor of mine). HO covers stories about outdoor sports, conservation, flora and fauna, and the people who help to make this place great or keep it that way. I think my more distant friends and family are pleased to get a glimpse into my life (my place and why I love it) through this lens. I’m grateful we have such a quality rag around here. And I hope you love your home like I do mine.

Rating: 8 whirring wheels.

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rerun: Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods by Christine Byl

Posted on November 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Because I still talk about and think about Dirt Work, and because (I still can’t believe my good fortune) I now get to build trails for a living, it feels right to talk again about this transcendent book. I hope I get time to reread it someday. Original publication and review from 2013. For more, check out Lookout, which also got a 10 (and those are rare).

Christine Byl opens her memoir with the pleasant scene of herself and three fellow crew members, crusty and dirty, having a post-hitch beer at a small-town Montana bar. A young woman approaches and asks how she keeps up with the boys, one of whom volunteers that it’s all they can do to keep up with her.

She then backs up and tells the story of how she got there. Like many young women in our culture, Christine was expected and expecting to go to college, to do cerebral work and keep her hands (literally) clean; but a summer gig held her, and she reveled in physical challenges, in learning new things, in the mechanical world. Eventually she reveled in her hardening muscles and her expertise, in surprising men with her ax-work and in mentoring other young women coming up in the “matriarchy” of trail work (still predominately male) within Glacier National Park.

After six seasons in Glacier, alongside boyfriend and eventual husband Gabe (a delightful character: mostly off screen, but clearly a capable young man in his own right, and clearly happy to stay lovingly out of Christine’s way), she does return to graduate school, in Alaska. But during the summers she still works on building and maintaining trails, this time in Denali. Christine and Gabe come to love Alaska – yes, even the winters: there is a delightful passage arguing that the light summers are in some ways harder than the dark winters, and I made both my parents (recently moved from the Mexican to the Canadian border) read it. They settle a few miles outside the borders of Denali National Park, and Christine finds a balance between the cerebral – she gets an MFA in fiction, and writes this beautiful book; and the physical – she and Gabe now run their own independent trail-building company.

So many things to love in this book; where to begin? As a sometimes volunteer trailworker myself, I don’t pretend to know 2% of what Christine does; but I might know just enough to appreciate what she loves about it, and what a challenge it can be. I still haven’t mastered the efficient, all-day ax swing myself, but I’d like to. Also, I have a friend named Susan who I’ve written about before, who has a great deal in common with this author. (I briefly wondered if “Christine Byl” was a pseudonym.) Susan, like Christine and apparently like many trail workers, has an advanced degree but chooses to labor for a living; she’s a woman in what is clearly a man’s world, and is half of an independent trailbuilding company. I get the impression that while it’s hard work, Susan and her husband Ryan wouldn’t do anything different.

Christine writes beautifully about the phenomenon of choosing to do physical work when she could be keeping her hands soft. She writes about the well-intentioned questions her family asked, about when she was going to get a “real job”: she says that they have confused happiness with orthodoxy. (I can only imagine how many of us can sympathize with that concept!) She writes about the “sorority” of men in trailwork, and the way that pulls women together; she writes about the pride she feels when upending male expectations of her blonde head and small frame. As a writer, and clearly a gifted one, she structures this book as solidly as she would a bridge or retaining wall. Each of 6 chapters is represented by a tool (axe, rock bar, chainsaw, boat, skid steer, shovel), a location (North Fork, Sperry, Middle Fork, Cordova, Denali twice) and a locale (river, alpine, forest, coast, park, home). Within those chapters she roves and rambles, musing on natural phenomena, social relations, her own body and personality, strengths and shortcomings, and then returns to tool and place to ground herself. The structure of this book, then, is both well-anchored and floating, and I found that it worked very well.

I was charmed by Christine Byl’s honesty; her love of place; her range of experiences and understanding of two worlds, that of universities and that of woods; and of course her lovely writing. She’s hard as nails, with two hernia surgeries and a preference for outhouse over indoor plumbing. She’s brash and can tend towards a loud and dirty mouth (that makes two of us), but she’s got a soft core. I like her; I’d like to be her friend, and of course I’d really love to learn from her.

Rating: 10 pulaskis (my personal favorite trailwork tool).

So good.

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Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River by Zak Podmore

Posted on September 30, 2024 by pagesofjulia


With Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River, investigative journalist Zak Podmore tackles a massive, complicated set of questions about western water management and the Glen Canyon Dam, the construction of which created a reservoir called Lake Powell. Arguably the most politically fraught and symbolic dam in the southwestern United States, Glen Canyon has long had its fans and detractors. The Millennium Drought, “an indefinite change in precipitation patterns” in the region, has “done three-quarters of the work toward draining Lake Powell already,” but this leaves numerous challenges: Indigenous people’s water rights, engineering and hydrology puzzles, the ecological implications for long-flooded lands freshly exposed to open air or buried under millions of acre-feet of sedimentation, and more.

Podmore acknowledges his own biases about the dam, which was in place before he was born. But he proceeds with copious and in-depth research into the many and complex issues it poses, considers what he learns with an open mind, and integrates hard science, cultural awareness, and competing viewpoints into an admirably accessible work of creative nonfiction. Podmore avoids binary options and magical thinking, and his study is richer for it. Included are surprisingly hopeful notes, such as the rapid recovery of native plants and ecosystems in newly exposed side canyons: “A canyon one hundred miles away, drowned for half a century, had restored itself in fewer than twenty years.” With narrative style and colorful characters, Podmore (Confluence) has composed a compelling, readable, and entertaining as well as educational text. Life After Dead Pool is superlative: important, insightful, and a pleasure to read.

This review originally ran in the August 30, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 cans of beans.

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Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson

Posted on August 2, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A profoundly depressed poet takes to the woods and delivers a lovely, moving memoir of nature writing and mental illness.

In his 40s, poet Jarod K. Anderson (Field Guide to the Haunted Forest; Love Notes from the Hollow Tree) left his job in academia to try to survive the debilitating depression he’d mostly hidden for decades. Early on in his memoir, he describes taking a walk in the woods, quietly observing nature as he had not in some time. He communes with a great blue heron and finds that there may be solace in a place where he’d forgotten to look.

Something in the Woods Loves You describes the slow and difficult process of seeking help and getting better, in increments, and with relapses. Anderson’s journey to wellness is not and perhaps never will be complete, but he does progress, and with a poet’s sensibility and attention to language and detail, this memoir relates not only his story but also philosophies and outlooks that will be helpful to many readers. While its subject matter is undeniably heavy, Something in the Woods Loves You is frequently light and positive.

There are notes of advice, but they’re always couched within Anderson’s personal experience, which he acknowledges will not be universal. The result is a memoir of the slow passage toward improved mental health, a deeply beautiful work of nature writing, and a treatise on the underestimated connections between the human and “natural” worlds. The setting is solidly grounded in Anderson’s home landscapes in Ohio (and, briefly, Tacoma, Wash.).

Organized in a seasonal cycle, Something in the Woods Loves You opens in winter: “A white page. An elm scribbled on a snow hill. Empty space making each syllable of life more vital…. Winter is the deep breath before a song.” In that stark season, not without effort, Anderson decides to seek help. In spring (“a gentle calamity of warmth and color”), he obtains access to antidepressant medication and, after a false start, finds a good fit in a counselor trained in cognitive behavioral therapy. In summer, the depression begins to lift. Fall brings a relapse, and the lesson that life will involve ups and downs.

Something in the Woods Loves You is also structured around 20 species, which include sugar maple, morel, eastern bluebird, lightning bug, raccoon, and human. “Fieldmouse” considers toxic masculinity in Western culture, including the unwillingness to ask for help. “Crow” contemplates a balance between science and magic. These are joined by many shining, glinting details, rendered in a poet’s prose under a careful eye: great blue herons “are a mix of shaggy and angular, a blade of yellow stone dressed in flowing robes stitched from overcast skies.” With these and other scintillating observations, Something in the Woods Loves You is revelatory.

This review originally ran in the July 16, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 seeds.

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The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey

Posted on July 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Told in the voice of a magpie, with humor and wisdom, this unflinching portrait of nature picks at the thin veil between the elemental violence and drama of both human and animal worlds.

Catherine Chidgey (Pet; Remote Sympathy) offers a singular combination of compassion, desperation, dark humor, and slow-building terror with The Axeman’s Carnival, set in rural high-country New Zealand. The story is told through the unusual perspective of a magpie fallen from the nest and rescued by a woman named Marnie, who lives on Wilderness Road with her husband, Rob, a sheep farmer and competitive axeman. They’re “under a lot of pressure,” a refrain that contributes to a general sense of foreboding: a drought threatens their livelihood; Marnie mourns a lost pregnancy; she is isolated from the world beyond their farm. An ominous thread runs through their lives in ways that readers gradually become aware of.

The narrator shares memories of being in the eggshell, occupying the nest with his sister and brothers. “She lifted me into her pillowed palm” and a relationship begins. Marnie releases the magpie to his flock, but he chooses to return to the woman he adores; she names him Tama, and posts his pictures to the Internet, which gains Tama a following. The sheep station suffers setbacks, and Rob’s temper and drinking become increasingly menacing, even as he trains for the annual competition where he hopes to win his 10th golden axe, which will offer both the affirmation he craves and a badly needed monetary prize. Tama’s Internet fame presents a financial opportunity for the family, but also puts them in the public eye, with new risks. Tama’s view of events is curious, in both senses of the word; “that was how houses worked,” he repeatedly notes, with each strange or sinister observation.

Magpies are very smart birds. Tama relates the story with humor and wisdom. He mimics human speech and understands it well enough to communicate, and the reader benefits from his viewpoint as he describes events, with grim foreshadowing. “When I think about what happened later, I remember that day,” he says, of various small violences. “Rob honed an axe with his honing stone…. He ran the blade through the hair on his forearm to test the sharpness, and we watched his crime show about shapely murdered women with torn-off clothes who’d let their attackers in their front doors.” Rob’s temper, his taste for crime shows and murdered women, his axes and admirable strength, his jealousy and Marnie’s fear, all contribute to the reader’s trepidation of what is to come. But The Axeman’s Carnival has tricks up its sleeve, and Tama himself should not be underestimated.

This review originally ran in the June 18, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cashews.

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The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations by Amy Leach

Posted on July 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Playful, celebratory, wise, impertinent, Amy Leach turns her lyricism and wit on a fundamentalist upbringing and the wealth of experiences beyond.

Amy Leach’s third book, The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisations, upholds the singular spirit of Things That Are and The Everybody Ensemble with a deepening of personal and spiritual subject matter. Whimsical, frank, funny, shrewd, and ever unpredictable, Leach’s phrasing and concepts continue to surprise, delight, and edify.

Where her previous works explored the world with curiosity, awe, an endearing silliness, and joy, The Salt of the Universe picks up with a new focus on Leach’s upbringing and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in which she was raised. “Now, in this book, I will let my soul speak for itself… I figure I’ve heard about five thousand sermons in my life, and now… I have something to say too.” What she has to say will be familiar in tone to her established readers, but fresh in its more personal angle.

Leach remains the master of the list, especially lists of the unexpected. Look out for how Walmart has taught her to find items she was not searching for, including “inflatable bathtub neck pillows and tropical Popsicles and Guinness Baltimore Blonde and misty-scented candles and Minions whistles.” Her subjects include not only gods but music and poetry; babies generally and her own two children in particular; snake grass and daffodils; brown dwarf stars and muons; an “interior Texas” and an outdoor heart and everything in between; the wide, wide world, both the small and the large; and the wonder and wondrousness of all forms of art, life, and love. In examining her relationship with Adventism and religion in general, Leach can be drolly tongue-in-cheek, and though earnest, never unfun.

This is a serious investigation into how to live, while coming from a religion that outlaws pickles and dancing. “We know not to read Shakespeare, or Boethius, but what are we to think of Snoop Dogg or Chubby Checker?… It is so hard to be stranded in the twenty-first century with only God as our guide.” Leach has split from Adventism, rejecting the prohibitions on spicy foods, literature, and, yes, pickles (though she still refrains from eating meat), but retains her sense of marvel and reverence at the vast and varied world–the tubax, dancing robots, sloths, Edith Wharton, Bob Dylan. “The apocalypse can’t be had for the hankering but the concerto sometimes can.” She does not profess to prescribe, but will still inspire. Sincerely inquisitive and wildly, fancifully imaginative, Leach’s perspective is a gift. The Salt of the Universe may be life-changing, even life-saving.

This review originally ran in the June 7, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 unsuitable subordinates.

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The Twilight Garden by Sara Nisha Adams

Posted on July 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Reading List comes a pleasingly similar, sweet novel of unexpected connections. In a shared garden in London, two sets of neighbors in two timelines (2018-19 and the 1970s and 80s) navigate conflict, build community, share love and struggles, and grow flowers, food, and strong bonds. It’s an optimistic story, which I perhaps don’t get enough of in my life.

I’m thinking of both this and Adams’ first novel as sort of meet-cute, enemies-to-friends stories, with rom-com sweetness but where the relationships that form are not romantic. Rather, neighbors and community members come together, across diversity in age, gender, sexuality, and race, and form deep and meaningful friendships and built families, caring for each other in profound but not romantic ways. There are romances among the cast of characters, but not in the relationships whose trajectory defines the novel. I’m thinking of these as non-romantic love stories, a genre I’ve not thought about before but am trying to define here.

We first meet two neighbors in contemporary London. Winston is a young Indian immigrant who has lived in his rental home for some years with his partner, Lewis, although their relationship seems to be drawing to a close. He’s lonely, disconnected, and a bit depressed, although his work in a nearby convenience store offers a wholesome and healthy dose of community connection. “He was always chatting to customers in the shop, but when it came to the neighbors on his road, he barely knew faces, let alone names.”

Bernice has just moved in next door, newly divorced, with her ten-year-old son Seb. She is white, well-off, privileged, uptight. Because chapters alternate between their perspectives, the reader knows that each is suffering their own private pains, but to one another, Winston and Bernice are each the nightmare neighbor. Their conflict centers around a shared garden, which Winston has treated as a private sanctuary and Bernice views as a death trap for her son. This garden, now in disrepair, transports readers back to the earlier timeline and two additional protagonists.

Maya first moved in (to what is now Winston’s home) with her husband Prem when they were newly arrived from India. They were soon joined by a daughter, Hiral. Next door (in what is now Bernice and Seb’s home) an older woman named Alma lived in the house she’d been raised in. Initially prickly, and permanently ornery, Alma becomes a dear friend to Maya’s family, a relationship that began in the garden. Alma is a very serious gardener and a bit of a control freak, but Maya encourages her to accept help from their community, and they wind up very much a neighborhood hub for food, fellowship, work, mutual support. In Winston and Bernice’s time, mysterious missives inspire the feuding neighbors to attempt reawakening the rich shared garden of years past, and the bonds of community come, slowly, along with it.

This story is deeply sweet, perhaps approaching what my mother would call ‘precious,’ but never getting there. There are no bad guys, although there are some bad behaviors; instead, these are humans who suffer and sometimes handle it poorly, but feel badly about it and try harder next time. The loves (familial, friendly, and romantic) are real and deep. I cried several times. It felt wholesome and good. There is tremendous diversity here in several senses, and closeness is possible across all those lines when humans reach out and make efforts, or when there is real need. It’s a lovely, hopeful version of the world, and I’m here for more of it.

Rating: 9 banana leaves.

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The Wheel of the Year: An Illustrated Guide to Nature’s Rhythms by Fiona Cook, illus. by Jessica Roux

Posted on June 24, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This beautiful book sold itself as soon as I walked into the art shop where it lived near the front door on display. I was absolutely ready for a treatment of cycles in the natural world as celebrated by human cultures, with gorgeously rendered art and suggested activities. I bought it in January, and all year have been reading the relevant sections at the appropriate times; I’m reviewing this book just after summer solstice, so haven’t made it all the way through yet, but I feel confident in my impressions.

The Wheel of the Year is geared toward younger readers with its introductory notes on safety (“always have an adult around… when you’re using the stove, oven, or knives”), but its offerings are for anybody. “Magic is real,” we are told. We are looking to find and recognize magic, and “just because something can be explained by science doesn’t mean it’s not also magical.” “The Earth and the Sun do a dance that turns the Wheel of the Year… there’s a rhythm to the seasons, and forming a relationship with your home and its inhabitants is true magic.” It’s definitely directed at kids (“Can you convince your grown-up to join you in sleeping outside, too?”), but works just as well for us young-at-heart, and I’m going to say it’s fun to think about convincing “my grown-up” to do any of this with me.

Following some brief remarks to this effect, we’re taking through the wheel of the year with its eight spokes: two equinoxes, two solstices, and four interstitial markers: beltane, lúnasa, samhain, and imbolc. The wheel is essentially pagan, “used by people who follow a nature-based spiritual path.” This guide surveys a number of cultures from around the world and different points in history, noting commonalities in how people recognize certain times of the year. As I began reading, I turned ahead to the moment in time I was living: imbolc, in early February, when various people observe Candelaria, Brigid’s Day, Carnival, the Lunar New Year, Groundhog Day, and more. I read about ways to get out and observe the changing world, how to make maple syrup, seasonal rituals and items for the imbolc altar, craft projects, and more. The glossary is pleasingly wide-ranging, with terms like cosmos and crepuscular, mycelium and solidarity.

The summer solstice is another rich one, and perhaps unsurprisingly, longer than some chapters. I love the positive messaging about being oneself: “Life, in its many forms, is expressing itself fearlessly in the world around you. Animals and plants wear their brightest colors, whether in fur, feather, fruit, or flower. You can do the same!” (Details follow.) I love the activities, rituals – each date has a ritual bath on offer; for midsummer we consider rose petals and coconut milk – and items to collect for an altar. It’s just lovely, wholesome stuff, celebrating and respecting the world around us.

I feel like my life has been improved by paying a little closer attention to moon phases, seasonal change, and solstices and equinoxes. A book like this is such a perfect fit, and such a genuine pleasure to read and touch and look at, with its large hardback format and beautiful art on thick pages. Check out those endpapers:

Highly recommend.

Rating: 9 tulips.

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Summer Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin

Posted on June 21, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Summer is the saturated season. The color floods back in. Each dip is another shot at being reborn, into summer where the world’s blood runs green.

For the summer solstice last night, I had my usual, traditional backyard fire. The traditions – my traditions – are accumulating: this time I had friends and food and drink around the fire as well. And I had a chapter from The Wheel of the Year to read (review forthcoming; it is wonderful), and I had a Nina MacLaughlin essay-book.

Six months ago I read her Winter Solstice, and now the summer one. It is the loveliest kind of homework to wake up and see what timely read I have for the day.

This little book barely clears 50 pages for the essay portion itself: perfectly sized for a same-day read, which is what I did. Now, this means I missed the advice to get up and wash one’s face in the solstice dew at dawn (also admittedly the summer solstice dawn is quite early for me). It is basically a lengthy meditation on summer and its resonances, for MacLaughlin and beyond; she has a number of works cited, mostly other works of literature (poetry, music) to which she refers, as jumping-off points for further musing. This won’t feel like ‘research’ so much in the traditional and dry-sounding way you might be thinking (although it *does* count as research!); more of a mining of other minds and cultural markers for how we think about summer, and midsummer or the solstice in particular. She does begin in early June, building into summer that way. MacLaughlin’s summer involves much swimming and waters, as well as fire, and sweat and sun and shade and fireflies (or lightning bugs) and a few other things we may hold, culturally, in common around here (several mentions are made of hot dogs). At least compared to my memory of Winter Solstice, I think there was less study of other cultural and historical handlings of the event. That could be my memory. Or it could be that Summer predated Winter by several years (ha) and the concept developed a bit in that time. This one does still offer an addendum of “Plant Matter,” featuring a few prominent plants and herbs associated with the summer solstice. I like that part.

I was not entirely surprised, in the Afterword, at MacLaughlin’s confession that she prefers winter. Again, perhaps it was just (or partly) the few years between books, but Winter Solstice felt fuller and richer to me. (Or maybe it was the hot mulled wine that accompanied that one, for this reader.) I am a summer person, myself, but her work on winter enriched that time for me considerably. There is still, here, the sensuality that I appreciated so much.

I would eat up more like this. I wonder if MacLaughlin would do the equinoxes, and maybe samhain and lúnasa and more…

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