Retirement Means Indulgence Reading – Adult Book Reviews on Bookends!

Lynn: Cindy and I are both retired and, while we love keeping our hand in with youth books, we find ourselves drifting quite often into adult books. I used to feel a bit guilty about that but if you can’t experience some indulgence in retirement, when can you? We decided it’s long overdue to start including some occasional reviews of adult books that we are enjoying.

Unquiet Bones by Mel Starr I’m going to start our new category by reviewing a series I’ve been reading with great pleasure for many years, The Chronicles of Hugh de Singleton, Surgeon (Lion) by Mel Starr. Adding to my enjoyment is the fact that Starr is a West Michigan author, and a career history teacher and I love finding local authors. Starr published the first of the series, The Unquiet Bones in 2008 but sadly I didn’t discover it until 2020 when I was looking for something to heal my pandemic reader’s slump. It was perfect for me! Totally engaging, with a charming and oh-so-human hero, an interesting mystery, and an outstanding historical setting. I loved it and I have been steadily moving through the series ever since, inserting it in the midst of YA, MG, and the occasional high-octane adult thriller and science fiction.

In the Unquiet Bones, we first meet Hugh de Singleton, a young surgeon fresh from training in Paris, setting up his first practice in Oxford. When an important local lord has a serious accident under his office, Hugh rushes out to provide medical assistance. Greatly impressed and grateful, the powerful lord offers Hugh a position as surgeon for his area and as his Bailiff.

Starr does a wonderful job of weaving the details of ordinary life in the 1300s into an intriguing mystery. Hugh is thoughtful, often introspective, and has a strong sense of justice. There is plenty of humor and Starr nails the dialog and setting in such an accessible way, providing a Glossary with terms. The descriptions of the meals are worth the time all by themselves. Who wouldn’t enjoy a feast of parsley bread and honeyed butter, fruit and salmon pie, aloes of lamb and pomme dorryse?

This is not a fast-paced thriller with explosions everywhere but an intriguing mystery confided by long-time friend and gently paced. Each new volume gets better and I love watching Hugh and his family grow and develop. Give them a try and stay tuned for more adult book recommendations.

To McCloskey’s Ducklings with Love

Lynn: This is a post about a childhood favorite, a city’s tribute, and a book celebrating them all.

Robert McCloskey’s wonderful Make Way for Ducklings was published in 1941. It was a book I adored as a child and my parents read it over and over to me. They may have tired of it but I never did. For a time, my family lived in Boston and all the locations in the book were a treasured part of my childhood. It was years later when the city commissioned a sculpture in 1987 to honor the famous book and by then I was an adult living far away. But on my visits back to Boston, I always checked in on the ducklings. And while I read articles about the wonderful contributions anonymous Bostonians made to the sculptures, it wasn’t until I chanced on a Goodreads listing that I learned about Ducks on Parade (Brandeis University Press, 2021) edited by Nancy Schön, the artist who created the famous sculpture in the Public Garden.

Schon’s introduction provides the history of the sculptures and relates that on their first birthday, in an official celebration the ducks were dressed in birthday hats and confetti. Shortly after that costumes began appearing on the ducks, mysteriously added during the nights. Schön marvels at the charm and skill of the costumes and writes of the special connection between the people of Boston and the duckling sculpture they have so clearly made their own. The book is a collection of photographs of the costumes that have adorned the ducklings over the years and a real celebration of public art.

Over the years the costumes have included seasonal and holiday themes like Easter bonnets, Pilgrim outfits, or Reading Day Dr. Seuss hats. They have also celebrated sports teams, and cultural events, or been symbols uniting the city like Boston Strong. Each photo made me smile and like the sculptor, marvel at how the people of Boston have made this sculpture their own.

For those of you still reading and loving Make Way for Ducklings, this wonderful little book will be a terrific pairing.

Cats and Dogs and Picture Books

Lynn and Cindy: You can NEVER have too many picture books featuring cats or dogs or both! Here are three terrific books featuring our furry friends.

My Wild Cat (Eerdmanns, 2019) by Isabelle Simler

I don’t know how I missed this one last year but I am so glad I caught up with it now. This is part scientific fact, part poetic description, part affectionate tribute and all stunning illustration. Simler is an illustrator I admire greatly and she clearly knows and loves cats. The book is in a small format, with each set of pages featuring a descriptive phrase, a related scientific fact as a footnote and wonderful drawings in pastel on a white background. The use of shape and form is simply brilliant and there is a smile lurking on every page. A cat is shown in a sink, the tail echoing the curved faucet, draped over a radiator or stalking a fly on a glass. Readers who cohabitate with felines will recognize every scene. Simple yet sophisticated this little gem would be treasured by readers of all ages.

Joy (Candlewick, 2020) by Yasmeen Ismail

It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt! Kitten has a ball of red yarn and it’s her favorite toy. An onomatopoetic rhyming play session ensues full of zooms and zams, clops and hops, until a trip, trip, slip, flip results in a bruised kitten, or at least a bruised ego. Her parent comes to the rescue and soothes her until she’s forgotten the hurt and is ready to adventure again. Oh, joy! Jenni Desmond’s mixed media illustrations exude the appropriate joy for Ismail’s rollicking picture book. Anyone who’s watched a kitten (or a young child) at play will appreciate this fun story.

Cat Dog Dog: The Story of a Blended Family (Random House/Schwartz & Wade, 2020) by Nelly Buchet

Blended families come in all shapes. This one features a man and his dog who moves in with a woman and her dog and cat. The story is told almost entirely in the illustrations with the various dog, cat, dog descriptors. There are adjustments to be made in every blended family as the various members learn to adapt to the shifting members and partners, amid lots of humor. Just as things are finally starting to calm down in the blended house a new element, a baby, is added to the mix! The humorous details are in the cartoonish ink illustrations, created by Zuill, who wrote and illustrated one of our favorite books, Sweety (2019). Cat Dog Dog is a current Junior Library Guild Selection, for a very good reason.

Warblers and Woodpeckers – Adult Book Break

Lynn: We love youth books and that is mostly what we read. But now and then it is fun to take a break and dip our toes in adult books. We’ve decided to add a new feature at Bookends – adult books that have a connection to kids, libraries, or the youth book world, and that we think our readers might be interested in. We’re calling it…..Adult Book Break.

My first recommendation is an adult book by a renown youth author, Sneed B. Collard III, Warblers & Woodpeckers: A Father-Son Big Year of Birding (Mountaineers Books, 2018). In 2016, Collard’s almost 13-year old son, Braden, suggested they do a “Big Year” together. Collard thought about it hard, citing some of the difficulties of such an effort from the physical to the financial. But Braden’s enthusiasm won the day. As Collard notes, “I wondered how much longer he would want to hang around with his dad.” And so it began.

I’ve been a birder all my life, inheriting the interest from my parents, but I am the rankest of amateurs! I have found some birding accounts a bit off-putting and, frankly, snobbish. Sneed Collard’s warm and lively book was accessible, informative, and anything but elitist. Told in a chatty confiding style, the stories of this father-son adventure are down-to-earth, relating triumphs and disasters from killer bee attacks to being stuck in the snow. The pair managed several special trips to important birding areas where they added a plethora of species to their growing lists. The stories of discovering new birds were really inspiring to me and I loved reading about the birding hot spots they experienced. Collard ends the chapters with a list of the birds seen that month and the back matter includes the complete Big Year list for each. There are also wonderful color photographs of birds that both Collards took during the year.

This Big Year experience was a joy to read and I came away feeling both as if I had been along on the trip and also yearning to pack my binoculars and head out immediately for my own Big Year. But the real heart of this book is the story of a father and his young son sharing something truly special. You don’t have to be an expert birder to love that.

Cindy: This was going to be a solo post by Lynn, but she talked about her “year list” all spring and when I headed to Arizona for Spring Break I decided to start my own Life List. By the time I returned to Michigan for the start of spring migration and the warblers started to dazzle me, I was hooked. It was fun to read about Sneed and Braden’s adventures as I had fresh memories of a couple of their Arizona hot spots. A Saguaro National Park ranger suggested I drive south an hour to Madera Canyon, and it was worth it!

I enjoyed their stories and their bonding over birds, and the peek into the birding research world through some of Collard’s contacts for his books. I appreciated Braden’s tenacity and enjoyment in building his list. Both father and son were hungry for the numbers, but their love of their special year together and their love and respect for the birds came shining through the text as well.

Queued up for this weekend is my first viewing of Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson’s 2011 film, The Big Year. It’s what got Braden into wanting to do his “Big Year,” so I figured I should add it to my list. Braden and Sneed (and the rest of the fam), you have an open invitation to come to West Michigan to bird with Lynn and me. There’s 380+ species in our county alone (Ottawa, MI). We have lots of gorgeous hot spots to show you!

For the children birders on your list, don’t miss our recent post, New Picture Books About Birds Take Flight. Sneed’s new book Birds of Every Color is included in the roundup.