I’ve been showing up with my newsletter in your email inbox more frequently than usual recently. During April, I sent you weekly book recommendations from my Read Your Way Through Earth Month’s curated list of nature-centered books. You’ll be glad to know, I’ll be going back to my once-a-month-if-I’m-lucky schedule beginning with this already-tardy May newsletter/blog.
As I write this, it is May the 4th Be With You Day, which many use to kick off a whole month of fun celebrations of movies and books in the Sci-Fi or Speculative Fiction genre. There is just no getting away from good stories, is there? Nope. There’s not! At the end of this newsletter, look for recommended books, old and new, that fit in this category from sister author Rebecca Inch-Partridge.
I like to include one old classic and one children’s book each year. And I like to start and finish Earth Month with books that leave me feeling realistically optimistic about our future on this planet. So here are the last five books from the 2026 Read Your Way Through Earth Month collection.
A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko is a wildly popular true adventure tale, a best seller. The subtitle, The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon, hints at the reasons why. But the book is so much more than “just” an exciting (mis)adventure memoir. It’s a history of the Grand Canyon before, during, and after its elevation to National Park. It’s a look at the geology, natural history, and ecology of the region. It’s “just” a terrific well-told story all around. I devoured it!
The classic Watership Down by Richard Adams was first published in 1972, the same year I graduated high school, and during the heady early days of the Environmental Movement. Nixon had just signed the EPA into law, and the momentum was strong to save the world from ourselves. Everyone was reading Watership Down back then. It’s a story of rabbits, a community of talking rabbits, whose meadow home is about to be demolished by humans with bulldozers and a plan to build a new housing tract. The author said, “It’s just a story about rabbits,” but everyone else interpreted it as an insightful political and social allegory.
Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore is a dark story set in the not-too-distant future. The seas are rising, the storms are growing larger, and the seed vault hidden away on a rocky remote island is threatened by both Mother Nature and humans with nefarious plans. The vault holds seeds from every plant on Earth, a safety precaution against a future climate disaster. Now the seeds are in danger. This is a breathless thriller by an award-winning author.
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown is my children’s book choice for 2026. It’s the first in a series of three books, and it’s been made into a wildly popular movie. A little robot wakes up after an accident to find itself on a remote island populated only by animals. It discovers that to survive it must learn from those animals, so it sets out to do so with heartfelt and humorous results. Another allegory perhaps?
I close the Earth Month 2026 list with Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As the title implies, it’s an honest and forward-looking nonfiction book about the state of our earthly environment. It’s filled with ideas that add up to a roadmap for moving forward in saving that environment and with it humanity. It looks at environmental science, history, technology, economics, and politics. Despite that heavy-sounding list, it’s uplifting, optimistic, and empowering. I wish every person in DC and Sacramento, and other power centers all across the country would read it. I’m tempted to send one to each of my representatives. Perhaps if we all did that, their offices would grow abundant with floor-to-ceiling piles of Abundance, and they’d each read one of them!
***A HUGE thank you to:
Everyone who hosted or attended one of my Earth Month book talks (Friends of Auburn Library, Lincoln Library, Kilaga Library of Lincoln Hills, OLLI at Sierra College, and PECA-Placer Earth Care Action). You can find the link to the Zoom video recording of the PECA talk on their website.
All the readers who attended one of those talks and played my book-bingo game.
Book-lovers who perused the list, purchased books and/or borrowed titles from their local libraries to add to their TBR (to be read) lists and piles.
Terrific authors who joined with me for this celebratory month and provided copies of their books for the book giveaway drawings.
Dedicated citizens who are determined to “save the environment” and save humanity from the ravages of the Global Warming disaster we have created.
I used an RNG (random number generator) to “draw names out of a hat.” Winners are listed below and will receive a congratulatory email from me or the author shortly!
Nancy B. of Oregon - Force of Nature by Joan Griffin
Sam D. of Montana - Havoc by Cam Torrens
Cindy V. of Wisconsin - Drawing Water by Barbara Lawrence
Carla H. - Everest and the Rest of Us by James Nehring
Linda M. - On Hiking by Arnold Marsden
Tara S. - Unspoken by Jann Alexander
Deb K. of Maryland - The View From Half Dome by Jill Caugherty
Suzy M. of California - Crossings by Ben Goldfarb
Bianca B. of Michigan - Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Anne H. of California - California Against the Sea by Rosanna Xia
Nicole B. of New York - The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Ashley G. of Michigan - Go As A River by Shelley Read
Janis R. of Ohio - The Gray Wolf by Louise Penny
Darlene B. of Pennsylvania - A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko
In the spirit of Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I took myself on two delightful local adventures, or artist’s field trips, this past month. They lifted my spirits, and just as Cameron predicted, they inspired me. I have photos to share with you, hoping you might find inspiration, too.
Tiptoe Through the Tulips at Crystal Hermitage Gardens
Every spring, over 70,000 tulips bloom at the Crystal Hermitage Gardens at Ananda on the ridge above Nevada City. I try to make the pilgrimage every year to wander through the rainbow of color on the terraced hillside overlooking the river canyon. I always come home filled with a lightness and newfound inspiration. With this year’s early onset of spring, the flowers were well ahead of time. My book club friends and I stuck with our plan and drove up on what was to be the last day the gardens were open. We took watercolors and paper, pencils and pastels, and sat in a garden almost free from people and attempted to capture the colorful beauty in photos and on paper. I haven’t indulged in an artistic adventure like painting en plein air in a very long time. It was really relaxing and emotionally refreshing! My bright pink, almost red, tulips are a lopsided version of the spectacular original!
Pine Tree Quilt Guild’s 40th Anniversary Quilt Show
Every May, I like to attend the annual quilt show at the Nevada County Fairgrounds in Grass Valley. There are hundreds of quilts—traditional and antique, artistic and experimental, huge and tiny—it’s a visual wonder. I do a bit of quilting, nothing fancy, and I find the displayed quilts both intimidating and inspiring. This year, just for fun, as I walked through the labyrinth of vertical displays, I went birding!
Remarkably Bright Creatures, the delightfully entertaining novel by Shelby Van Pelt, came out a couple years ago. It seemed like everyone I knew was reading it. My book club loved it. I taught a literature class for OLLI at Sierra College based on the book. And it got rave reviews! Now Netflix has turned it into a movie, staring Sally Field as the central character Tova. I loved Field as Gidget and The Flying Nun. I loved her as Norma Rae and Forrest Gump’s mother and as Mary Lincoln. Now, I’m pretty sure I’m going to love her as Tova. Let’s all watch it together starting on May 8! Then, let me know if you like the book or the movie better. Okay?
Read about the movie here. And find the book on Amazon here, on Bookshop here.
Book #2 is coming along—slowly but surely. As you probably know, it’s about growing up adopted in the Fifties and Sixties and then later meeting my biological family members as an adult. I sent my manuscript of the complete book (a very, very early draft) to my developmental editor MaxieJane Frazier at Mighty Mule Editing a couple weeks ago so she could work her creative magic. I’m expecting it back later this month. I’m a little excited and a lot worried about what she’s going to say. But, I know I’ll have renewed creative energy to take Strangers in My Blood to the next level!
In the meantime, let me introduce you to one of my “new” sisters, Genie Morrow. She’s a much younger half-sibling on my birth-father’s side of my oft-grafted family tree. We “found” one another back in 2019, just before the big Covid shutdown began. Along with her siblings, Genie makes a significant appearance in the third third of Strangers in My Blood. Like her brother and sister (not me), she’s an accomplished musician, a singer-songwriter. (I obviously didn’t get that gene.)
Genie and her husband Nigel and their Indie Rock Band Sputnik the Band are in the process of putting out a new album. They just this week released the first song from the new album and have come out West and are touring in California. The song is called “Lone Wolf Party,” and you can check it out at the QR code below. Of course, they’re on Instagram and Spotify and everywhere else!
I’m so proud of my baby half-sister. And excited to introduce her and her band to you. Here’s their webpage. I can’t wait for you to read in my book about how I met and got to know all my half-siblings. It makes for quite an exciting story!
My friend, sister writer, and editor/book coach, Rebecca Inch-Partridge, writes speculative fiction, AKA sci-fi for those of us old-school types. She has put together a collection of “31 Novels that Ask… What If?” in honor of “May the 4th Be With You” Speculative Fiction Month. The book list includes old classics like Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and my favorite Handmaid’s Tale, as well as fresh new titles like her own growing Paraxous Star Cluster series, Escaping the Dashia and Hunting the Dashia. You can find more about this terrific book collection at Inch-Partridge’s website by clicking on the image below. There you can also find information about the planned book launch party to celebrate the release of Hunting the Dashia.
Author and artist Sandra Boynton is the Board Book Maven, the Queen of the love-drenched, silly stories that kids and parents and GRANDMA’S love to read aloud!
Thanks for Reading and Subscribing to my newsletter/blog. It means a lot to me!
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I am also an affiliate of Bookshop.org. Every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores. In addition, as an affiliate, I will earn a commission if you use my Bookshop.org page and make a purchase. I donate my profits to Sierra College Food Pantry and/or the Interfaith Food Bank of Auburn.
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