A memoir centered around Fisk's month-long stay in Belize, with branchings out ("digressions" would imply irrelevance) to earlier experiences, which makes an interesting story of a woman who came into her own as a widowed senior citizen. Not only recommended, but I'm looking forward to reading her other books.

Sent as a RABCK

Thanks for sending this book my way. Looks interesting!

This book a little bit for me to get used to the wandering pattern of the book. Once I got to that point, I started to really enjoy the book. Even learned a little about birding. Now I'm curious to what her other books are like. I liked the glimpses of her life: when she was married, when her husband died, the people who made a difference in her life, etc. Thanks again for sending this my way!

Travel *and* birding - great combination! Taking this one out of thegoaliegirl's travel bookbox; thanks for sharing! [The acting bookbox journal is 101 Things To Be Thankful For.]

I see that the author is from Cape Cod, so if I finish the book in time I'll take it along to the Boston Unconvention in August (see the convention info here) for one of the "New England books/authors" events.

Well, I didn't finish the book in time for the convention {wry grin} - I found that I had to read it slowly so I could savor it properly, and by the time I finished it, the convention had come and gone. [And then I lost it among my to-be-reviewed piles, so the You're Such An Animal release challenge came and went as well. I've gotta work on that!]

Anyway: I found this a truly delightful and offbeat memoir, including fascinating pictures of life among the field biologists in Belize, and some poignant, sometimes heartbreaking, and often wonderfully amusing comments on life, love, aging, and just dealing with what life throws at you.

Her writing style is chatty and easily distracted; I enjoy this, but it does mean that one needs to pay attention, as the subject of discussion (not to mention the time and place being discussed) can change from one sentence to the next! The book proper starts with an apology for the length of the introduction, and I knew at that moment I was going to like it. "That was a pretty long introduction. I'm sorry. I'll try to remember to tell you later what I will be doing in Belize. At the moment I am lying on the cold cement floor of my Cape Cod, Massachusetts basement, wondering if I have broken a kneecap." Way to involve the reader!

She talks about solitude, deadly snakes, bird-banding, her life prior to this trip, and many other things - often in the same chapter. "Bird nets - I had better explain bird nets. Mist nets. I wrote a book - is that manuscript lost? What am I to do if it is?? I'll have to go home. I worry, every hour. I wrote a book about a winter I spent pretty much alone and incommunicado on a mountain in southwest Arizona, to everyone's dismay." Eventually she explains that she didn't define "mist nets" in that book and got flack for it from her editor, but the way she included her entire stream of consciousness really tickled me. (Talking about Prohibition - which she mentions a few paragraphs after the preceding quote - she adds, "We had English teachers then, too, who tried to teach me not to digress, at least in the middle of a paragraph, but as I said above, I skipped a few things in school." Hee!)

This is one of those books that wound up studded with little bookmarks of places I wanted to quote or at least mention, so many that it would be a very long book review indeed if I made the attempt. But it's hard to pick and choose, so I should probably just stop here and say "I loved the book, do give it a try!"

Well, OK, maybe one or two: at one point the author delighted me by referring to Henry Beston's The Outermost House, which was located on a beach near her home.

Mentioning some of the local wildlife: "Tarantulas aren't fearsome monsters, though it does give you a start to find one inside your bra as Dora did one morning, dressing."

And: "Once - I keep telling you that bird banding has fringe benefits, is full of delights - I underwent a marriage proposal while skinning out a pile of house sparrows." [She declined.]

And this one: "What you need to write about in a letter or a journal, what you let your friends see, if you want to have friends, are the bright coins of your days - the small happinesses, the uneventful minutiae that can be turned into laughter, illuminations, the courtesies and goodness of your companions. The other side of those coins, which keep psychiatrists in business - the Why Am I Here? Who Wants Me? What Makes Me Think I Matter? - we try to conceal. Who wants to hear your problems? They have their own. Who wants to read them spread out on paper? I have been reading such a book, by a woman always in tears. Why doesn't she shape up? I ask crossly as I plod through her pages. What good is all that crying doing her, or me?" [Note: Fisk does do a little sad musing of her own here and there, especially when thinking of lost loves, but she doesn't roll around in it. Even at the end, where she admits to growing fears that her aging frame will not allow her to live as she wants to - and that she's decided long since that when she can't do what she wants anymore, she'll "quit" (life, that is) - she comes out of the fearful mood to one of hope and a willingness to look for something else to do.]

I found the book charming, moving, and funny - and I'd like to read more of her work. Thanks for sharing this one.

This book's going into bookstogive's Making New Friends bookbox, which will be on its way to the next stop today. Enjoy!

This great book returned in the Traveling and Making Friends Bookbox, thanks for including it! I have not read this one before so onto MTR it goes.

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