Category Archives: Authors

More novella than novel, Sy Montgomery wins my heart over again with her magical storytelling about the most nonmagical magic– the natural world. Clocking in at 96 pages or just about two hours on audiobook, her newest: The Hummingbird’s Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and the Renewal on Wings is a special gift for readers and why it’s my favorite for the month.

Her deep connections to the animal world allowed her to weave her scientific escapades with her art of writing that allows the couch scientist to experience animals hidden deep inside jungles or the ones that we rarely think about right outside our windows. This story is a rescue mission; the rehabilitation of several hummingbirds by a friend of hers while she was able to help caretake alongside. The interwoven history of hummingbirds and their significance to groups worldwide is evidenced by their names in other cultures is given equal status in the book with the health of the bird’s of the story.

My recommendation would be to listen to Montgomery tell you the story via the audiobook version as I did because nothing can replace the emotional and logical approach to keeping the hummingbird’s alive. It’s an action-adventure in real life– will they or won’t they survive? What is the ethics of saving them? How do they experience the world? It’s all packed in this slim volume that feels as luxurious as a bite of dark chocolate.

Enacted last month, this is the post at the end of each month where I can review everything that I’ve read and choose my version of the book of the month.

May’s winner is… End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James L. Swanson.

Swanson is always a top pick for me because his love for history shines through his ability to write the most epic of stories. At this point, aside from some random law books that he’s edited, I have generally read every book he’s written for a civilian audience. I had read his YA version of End of Days called “The President Has Been Shot!”, so while I already had the foundational knowledge of the assassination, the fact that Swanson took a deep dive writing for the adult audience was still as intense as learning about it for the first time. There were several chapters and a handful of pages writing about the mere seconds it took Oswald to shoot JFK and each word, each sentence, and each page was like reading about years of time gone by. Swanson freezes time as he writes and picks apart the decisions, actions, and reactions by all involved.

And the presentation of the details imprints in a reader’s brain. I spent close to an hour recounting the insane details to my husband after I had finished– needing to tell someone else about what I had just learned. Swanson makes the case for all amazing nonfiction writers that should be writing narrative nonfiction read in school rather than a textbook. Gifted writers like Steve Sheinkin, Don Brown, Sy Montgomery, and Gail Jarrow.

The thicker history books whether they be biographies or narrative have become a bigger chunk of my reading and if you’re looking to learn, this is one of those that will bring you back (if you were alive on November 22, 1963) or put you there if you weren’t.