A Food-Obsessed Book

Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki
Published in Japan in 2017 and in the US in 2024.

 

The characters in this book can’t stop thinking about food — including a woman who is in jail because she was a serial killer, and another character who is a journalist doing a story about the murders. As you can imagine, the plot is a bit over-the-top! Everything centers on food descriptions, which  are incredibly detailed but eventually get out of hand. Especially about butter. For example:

“As it melted under the heat of her tongue, the sweet butter expanded lusciously, rousing all the cells across her body capable of apprehending its rich goodness.” (p. 69)

Unfortunately, around half-way through the author seems to have lost her way, and the narrative becomes nearly unreadable. Earlier the book was a bit repetitive but this flaw gets worse and worse: really annoying. But I continued reading and finished the book despite being bored and bothered. 

I was surprised to learn that the plot is based on the history of an actual serial killer! Wikipedia says: “Kanae Kijima (木嶋 佳苗, Kijima Kanae; born November 27, 1974), known as The Konkatsu Killer, is a Japanese fraudster and serial killer, convicted for poisoning three would-be husbands and suspected of four more, spanning from 2007 to 2009.”

A few quotes:

“Reiko set down on the table a selection of large plates, each of a different design and glaze, and the meal began. Bagna càuda with a plentiful variety of steamed winter vegetables and a rich anchovy sauce, thinly cut slices of warmed salt pork, a tofu and leek gratin, rice cooked in an earthenware pot with vegetables and chopped oysters, and miso soup,” (p. 7)

“Eating was ultimately an individual and egoistic compulsion, Rika was starting to realise. A gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth. You could wrap up their mission in all kinds of fancy language, but they were simply confronting their desires day in and day out. As you learned to cook, you became increasingly able to shut out the outside world and create a fortress within your own spirit.” (p. 179)

“When I made them boeuf bourguignon, all they saw was beef stew.’ (p. 336) 

Note: I do not recommend this book! It’s tedious and I suspect the translation is bad, or at least in English the author often seems to use the wrong word for common things. (Example: for the entryway of an ordinary house, the book uses the word “lobby.” The book uses the phrase “a pat of butter” to refer to an entire 200 gram stick of butter. And so on.) If you want to read Japanese literature with food scenes, I recommend Haruki Murakami. 

Murderers, Poets and Barbecue

 

Creepy country house in 1925. Helena Bonham Carter. Agatha Christie. New Netflick…Just wow!

E.C.R. Lorac’s novel offers us another aristocratic family down on their luck,
living in the ruins of their family manor. Suspense! Murder! More Wow!

The Poet X — a poor high-school girl trying to become a poet.
Couldn’t be more different from stories of the English aristocracy!

Barbecue Take-Out for Dinner

Barbecue from Satchel’s: chicken, beef, coleslaw, salads, cornbread.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Iceland

 

The overpowering theme of this book by the only Icelandic Nobelist — Halldor K. Laxness — is hunger. It’s a hunger that modern readers have almost surely never experienced. Especially in spring (a season of hunger for farming people everywhere that’s been forgotten by people like us) the lack of fresh food or perhaps the lack of any food is unimaginable. The food that was put away in the fall (or the money put away to buy food) may not last until the first produce of spring comes in. 

In Independent People, the entire focus is on one sheep-raising family who are trying to make a living from a farm in the wilds of Iceland. Sheep are their livelihood and their obsession. The author describes their spring expectations:

“They would feel reasonably sure of surviving the winter, and of getting enough rye meal, refuse fish, and coffee to rear the kids on, those at least that didn’t die (the others were forgotten), always provided that they restricted themselves to the customary one meal a day in the spring.” (p. 17)

The central character, Bjartur of Summerhouses, lives in this extremely isolated area some time in the early 20th century, beginning before the First World War and continuing until shortly afterwards. Bjartur is a semi-secret poet and his verses are part of the novel. He seems naive in many ways.

His story, in brief: his first wife dies, he remarries, several children are born, and some other people live with the family on the farm. They always seems isolated by the distance from the isolated farm to the small settlement nearby, the incredible distance to Reykjavik (where none of them have ever visited), and the unimaginable distance to the wider world, which hardly seems to them even to exist. Eventually, they are made rich by the war and its need for the local resources, and then made poor by the aftermath when their products were no longer demanded by the wider world.

Bjartur has a number of fixed ideas that vary between comic and tragic. 

“You should beware of believing things you see in books. I never regard books as the truth, and least of all the Bible, because there’s no check on what they can write in them.” (p. 64)

In a recent introduction to the English edition of Independent People, here is a summary of this character: “Bjartur is for me one of the great twentieth-century literary characters—one of the immortals, like Humbert Humbert or Jay Gatz/Gatsby or Gregor Samsa or the four Makioka sisters. He is petty-minded and heroic; brutal and poetic; cynical and childlike.” (p. xvii) I don’t agree with this comparison, but I’m including it because it’s probably more standard than my own views.

Bjartur isn’t the only character in the novel whose desperate poverty and eccentric views define him — here’s a description of one of the others, a Bailiff:

“His trousers were so worn that the original cloth no longer held the patches and was giving way at the stitches. Turned up over the bottoms was a pair of yellowish socks, undyed, and the down-at-heel horsehide shoes on his feet lent support to the theory that he was newly returned from a thoroughgoing inspection of the stables, stronger testimony being provided by the smell. In clothing and general appearance Bjarter of Summerhouses was far superior to this tramp-like Bailiff.” (p. 104) 

Also, a description of Bjartur’s second wife: 

“She would go drooping off home just before nine to boil the fish, but very often she could not get the fire to draw. She brought him his fish, rye bread, and coffee out to the meadow. ‘There’s no need to be stingy with that muck,’ he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things.” (p. 38) 

And a description of some of his fellow farmers and craftsmen:

“New men on the croft, famous master builders who turfed the ewe-house walls in such a fashion that the courses took on a herring-bone pattern; a journeyman carpenter with foot-rule, pencil, and saw, mental arithmetic in his eye; the fresh scent of shavings blending with the smell of autumn’s mud and rain; boisterous conversation at meal-times, fragrant snuff, poetry, merchants and co-operative societies, sheep, sheep again, interesting information from irrelevant quarters, unknown phrases, brawls, sweet coffee.“ (p. 239) 

The novel Independent People is one of those sagas of the early 20th century that now seems to develop with painful slowness. Characters die. Children grow up and try to understand the world around them. Life is hard, and from their earliest years they all have to work in terrible conditions, sometimes with their clothing soaked and freezing, sometimes when they are too tired to continue, etc. etc. The character sketches vary between irony (even satire) and sympathy. Their concerns are sometimes taken seriously and sometimes — I think — viewed as primitive or even childish. It’s not a book that satisfies current tastes any more, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it except for historical curiosity, as it’s extremely long, repetitive, and overburdened with descriptions.

Birds and Sheep

A pair of phalaropes we saw in Svalbard, another island in the far North.

Birds are everywhere in the landscape of this novel, and I was fascinated by the author’s descriptions of them. Though I did not see the specific birds on my trip to Iceland, I did see many in Norway. Of the many species named, I especially like hearing of the phalarope:

“On every pool of the river there was a phalarope to make her a bow; no bird in all the marshes is so courtly in its demeanour on Midsummer Eve.” (p. 193)

“Soon the marshes would be green and humming with life the same as they were last year, with the phalarope preening itself in courtesy on the surface of the deep pools. And the little waterfall up in the mountain would be flowing backward in the sunny breeze.“ (p. 246)

Of course there’s also constant mention of the sheep.  

These sheep we saw on Runde, an island in Norway,
 but the landscape is comparable to that in Iceland. 

Some photos of Iceland that I thought about when reading:

From our trip to Iceland in 2021.

Blog post and photos © 2021, 2025 mae sander

“Noopiming”

 

Noopiming  is a book about many things. It’s more like a collection of poems than a novel, but it also has characters — vivid characters — and social history about the life of Native Americans in Canada, both rural and urban. Here’s a wonderful passage about birds:

“It is a place where birds congregate because there is no other place left. There are more than three hundred species there and so it is well known by ornithologists and birdwatchers, and in the fall and spring the migrating songbirds and shore birds stop on their way to something better. … Asin watches the boreal owl hunt for voles at dusk, and then Asin rides back to their apartment. The boreal owl is antisocial and nocturnal, like Asin. They are a sit-and-wait predator the size of a robin. They sit fifteen to twenty feet above the ground in trees, close to the trunk. The summer is their breeding season. While there are considerably fewer species of birds than there used to be, birds are still engaged in the building blocks of their nation, and they work to reproduce not just their bodies, but all the structures, behaviours and beliefs that enable large-scale survival. There are large-ish colonies of double-crested cormorants and black-crowned night-herons. Asin does not have a life list of birds they have seen, because unlike most other birders, that’s not why Asin is here.“ (pp 110-113)

Boreal owls (from google)

Of course there are lots of passages about food as well. Here is one of my favorites: 

“In the spring, Adik, Akiwenzii and Sabe ate duck and turtle eggs. In the summer, they picked buckets full of berries, tended the garden and fished. In the fall, they were the busiest. They riced. They harvested the garden and cached it away for later. They hunted ducks and geese. They hunted deer and moose, dried meat and tanned hides.” (p 178)

This is an unconventional book. so I can’t write a conventional review. I checked, the reviewers at the time the book was published didn’t do it justice, in my opinion. It’s hard to read, but it’s worth the effort. 

More Books and More Walks

Neighborhood News: 

The Great Pumpkins Have Arrived! 

When I drove past this morning, this year’s giant pumpkins were being carved.
Now we are ready for Halloween!

Reading

Practical Magic: a real Halloween book about witches!

Books about witches seem to be domestic, because witches are domestic. Their cookpots may be filled with unthinkable and inedible stews, but the concoctions do steam up the domestic space in the kitchen. And often, witches cook real delicious food. The witches in Practical Magic definitely fit this stereotype, and I loved it. From the beginning when witch Sally fixes lunches for herself and her sister, and also later when Sally and her daughters go back to visit the witching house in Massachusetts, their cooking sounds delicious and also normal: 

“Sally was the one who cooked healthy dinners of meat loaf and fresh green beans and barley soup, using recipes from a copy of Joy of Cooking she’d managed to smuggle into the house. She fixed their lunchboxes each morning, packing up turkey-and-tomato sandwiches on whole-wheat bread, adding carrot sticks and iced oatmeal cookies…” (p. 6)

“They’ll fix a picnic lunch of cream cheese and olive sandwiches, pita pockets stuffed with salad, Thermoses filled with lemonade and iced tea. They’ll pack up the car the way they do every August, and get on the highway before seven, to avoid traffic.“ (p. 195) 

“Vegetarian lasagna and green bean salad with almonds, and cherry cheesecake for dessert, all homemade.” (p. 198) 

The two sisters escape the real witch house of their aunts, who actively practice witchcraft and do spells for women in distress (especially distressed love) — but their powers follow the sisters when they try to escape, and in the end, witching is the big thing. Meanwhile, they have insights about life and all its complexities, but can’t always solve their own problems. They are also cursed: the men they love are doomed to die. As one sister observes: “Money, love, or fury—those are the causes for most everything.” (p. 202)

Note: I haven’t seen the movie of this book, and I just read about a coming sequel to that movie. The review was lukewarm, so I probably won’t bother to see either of them.

Mary Burton: What She Saw

What She Saw was a free book offered to me by amazon.com (I don’t know why). I had never heard of the book or of the author, but I did read the whole thing. It’s a suspense novel about some pretty icky murders, but the descriptions of violence aren’t excessive. The author has written many other books, but I doubt if I. will read any of them. I guess this is another good choice for Halloween reading!

Halloween Again: Walking in my Neighborhood

This “dog” barks and jumps out of his house when you walk by on the sidewalk.
It’s very scary!

Most of the blow-up decorations are boring, but this one is kind of neat.

At the local produce store: pumpkins everywhere.

Important Halloween news from the New York Times: “the price of chocolate candy has risen almost 29 percent over the start of the Halloween season last year. A recent survey by the personal finance site FinanceBuzz has prices of Halloween candy up 78 percent from five years ago.” If you have been getting ready for trick-or-treaters you already know this!

The Botanical Garden in Autumn

A beaver lives here.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

“The Emperor of Gladness”

“Her preferred meal was the Salisbury steak frozen dinner made by Stouffer’s, the one that came with a tiny puddle of a brownie that congealed during the third minute in the microwave. Her EBT card had enough for them to have Stouffer’s about three times a week. … His own vice was Pop-Tarts, which he bought in a forty-eight-count box and stored in his room to be eaten untoasted and dipped in instant coffee.” (The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, p. 39).

The Emperor of Gladness tells the story of two people: a very young man named Hai whose family is Vietnamese and an elderly woman named Grazina, whose family is Lithuanian. They live in a small town — East Gladness, Connecticut —where they have each come to live more or less randomly in a thoroughly American setting. 

The novel is complex and has many themes: one of them happens to be food. Specifically, the food that poor people, immigrants, and a variety of down-and-outs choose. They love what richer and classier people call junk food, and they love it because it tastes good and satisfies their hunger. (This just happened to be a theme that I discussed in a blog post a couple of days ago.) I think that Vuong has a message to his intellectual readers about how junk food is meaningful, not just convenient, for people who aren’t like them.

There are many other themes: the characters take many pills — too many; Grazina is struggling with senile dementia and has a collection of owl figurines; Hai is struggling with drug addiction as well as the realization that he’s gay; above all, everyone has a painful past, even Hai who is only 19 years old. The novel’s other characters all have their struggles too. However, in this blog post, I’m focusing on the food themes.

Hai and Grazina’s story begins with Hai standing on a bridge contemplating a final jump into a river. She sees him and insists that he come down, and she saves and then arranges his life. From that time on, he lives with her in a house in sight of the bridge. She even gives him a special name, Labas, her version of “Hai,” which means Hello in Lithuanian. 

Is he her servant? A caretaker? A charity case? Just a happenstance roommate? Yes. Sometimes one of these, sometimes all of them. 

Grazina’s house is a dump, but it’s a home. Poverty is the situation of just about everyone in the novel, but they don’t dwell on it. After Grazina takes him in, Hai gets himself a job at HomeMarket, which sells rotisserie chickens and a variety of side dishes, such as creamed spinach and mac and cheese.  “It looked like any other fast-food place: rubber mats on tiled floors, blocky steel appliances, fluorescent lights, all of it smelling vaguely of ketchup and used dishwater.” (p. 69)

HomeMarket is staffed by an array of sympathetic but unusual characters, including his cousin Sony, an autistic youth who is fascinated by the Civil War. Sony gets Hai the job. As the New York Times review puts it: “As at ‘The Office,’ one of Grazina’s favorite TV programs, HomeMarket is the stage for an array of diverse and daffy personalities: the 6-foot-3, buzz-cut female manager who aspires to the pro wrestling circuit; the diabetic ‘chicken man’ on the grill who looks like a portly Al Green; the foulmouthed Irish cashier whose son died; the nose-ringed drive-thru guy known as Russia.” (source)

The descriptions of the HomeMarket food slowly reveal that it looks and smells and tastes like home-cooked meals, especially like traditional Thanksgiving dinner — but it’s actually produced from industrially-grown chickens, frozen blocks of cooked vegetables, and other less-than-natural sources. Everyone’s favorite, the corn bread, is enhanced secretly with an extra ingredient introduced by one of the workers. “She buys vanilla cake mix in bulk from Costco, right? Then mixes it into the company corn bread recipe.” (p. 180)

Several favorite foods characterize Hai and Grazina. He loves Pop Tarts. She loves Salisbury Steak TV dinners and believes that carrots have healing powers. They are almost like a couple: “Hai sat sipping coffee and nibbling a Pop-Tart while reading The Brothers Karamazov, the worn paperback cover translucent against the words beneath. ‘What’s a samovar anyway?’ Hai put down the book. ‘Some kind of Indian pastry, yes? Jesus, I used to know. But that was a long time ago.’ Grazina scrunched her nose and removed her glasses.” (p. 292)

Another quote from the NYT review: “For sure this is a book deeply attentive to oft-overlooked populations and simple survival; Hai may be reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ but he’s living out of ‘Fast Food Nation’ and ‘Nickel and Dimed.’”

At the end, Vuong offers his readers a summary of the food-themes of the novel: “Our kind has built a box using four walls and a roof and called it HomeMarket, called it McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Burger Chef, Subway, Panda Express, Pizza Hut. Centuries from now, when the cosmos are no longer mysteries infinitely multiplied by syllables, they will unearth the ancient and mildewed libraries and understand us as the epoch that reheated chemically preserved sustenance we never cooked under red roofs, from which we asked How can I help you? endlessly, day and night, through droughts and earthquakes, through wars and floods and assassinated presidents, fallen towers and allegiances, impeachments and suicides, through birthdays, some so insignificant they will be forgotten even by those they crown, knowing so little can be kept—not even the gnomic words that nonetheless birth the histories between two people: Hello, Hai, Labas.” (p. 480)

Here’s a picture of how I think HomeMarket would look. It’s a composite of several web images.
Rotisserie chicken can be very delicious!

Amusing cultural note: The review of this book in The Guardian (here) reveals the reviewer’s lack of understanding of American restaurant classifications. It refers to the Hai’s place of work as a “diner” — a term that is NEVER used by the author to describe HomeMarket. The word “diner” appears in the book only when the author means actual diners in the American sense. Cluelessly, the Guardian article is illustrated with an image of a stereotyped diner like one sees in museums and movies, something from the distant past. My American readers will understand what I’m getting at, and I’ve included the above image for those who may not be aware of chicken places as an American institution.

Book review © 2025 mae sander

Murakami Forever

The first two stories ever published by Haruki Murakami:

These two short novels, Wind and Pinball, are very enjoyable reading. I’ve long been a Murakami fan, but never read these early works, the beginning of his fascinating literary accomplishments. Murakami novels are usually very long and involved, with sometimes hard-to-follow plots and magical realism. These stories are very simple, short, and have pretty much straight-line plots. There’s no magic — only somewhat eccentric characters such as a pair of identical twins who show up and move into the narrator’s small apartment, and then just as abruptly pack up their clothes, get on a bus, and leave.

I did find that these works illustrate the author’s love of detail and his wonderful turn of descriptive phrases, especially for evoking very ordinary things like food and music. Murakami loves American jazz and popular music, which appear here as in almost all his later works. Almost every one of his works of fiction has some passages about cooking, including these early ones — as his works became more surrealistic, food was often a way that he grounded his narrative in every-day life.

Some quotes that embody what I see as pure Murakami:

“When I stuck my head out the window I thought I sniffed rain. A few autumn birds cut across the sky. The drone of the city was everywhere, a mix of countless sounds: subway trains, sizzling hamburgers, cars on elevated highways, automatic doors opening and closing.”

“My cassette tape of an old Stan Getz album was the musical background for my efforts that morning. It was a dynamite band featuring Getz, Al Haig, Jimmy Raney, Teddy Kotick, and Tiny Kahn. Whistling Getz’s solo to ‘Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid’ from start to finish along with the tape really picked me up.”

“The foghorns on the ships anchored at sea were emitting sharp, plaintive wails, like calves that had strayed from the herd. Some of the wails were brief, others long, but each had its own distinct pitch as it cut through the darkness on its way toward the mountains.”

"We pulled up next to the water and sat there in the car, drinking coffee from the thermos and munching the cookies the twins had bought. There were three kinds—buttercream, coffee cream, and maple— that we divided up into equal groups to give everyone a fair share.” (Photo: coffee cream cookies from the web).

  

“I had finished my bath and downed the last of my beer when they finished grilling the trout. There was one for each of us, with canned asparagus and a huge bunch of watercress on the side. The trout tasted like something from the good old days—a mountain path in summer. We took our time picking every last morsel from the fish with our chopsticks. All that was left on the plate was white bones and a pencil-sized watercress stalk. The twins washed the dishes right away and made coffee.”

I’ve been reading Murakami’s novels since 1989, mostly picking them up at the time they were published. He’s quirky! I appreciate his very strange sense of reality, which I think is grounded in an amazing ability to observe the details of life, as in these early novels. 

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Gods of the Underworld and Earthly Adventures

 

“The Black Road leads to Xibalba, and at its heart there sits my palace, like a jewel upon the crown of your kings. It is very large, and decorated with colorful murals. It has almost as many rooms as the year has days.” (p. 98)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes myths set in modern times. She brings old gods to life, using the language of ancient story-tellers. I’ve enjoyed several of her books, and this was as good as the others. Two gods of the underworld struggle violently for domination, and use a mortal girl to try to win. She emerges as her own person, not a subordinate. Are you in need of escape reading? This is a good choice.

Ordinary Life

April snow.

At the Supermarket

"Disease, Hurricane, and Trump's Tariffs Are to
Blame for Orange Juice Getting Way More Expensive" (Food & Wine)

“Compared with a year earlier, egg prices are up 60.4 percent.”

More Reading

Murakami is always so fascinating! Not to mention gently weird.
This is a short tale of a small boy’s surreal experience in a very “strange” library.
Typical Murakami: lots of food.

Quote: “The food looked scrumptious. There was piping-hot sea urchin soup and grilled Spanish mackerel (with sour cream), white asparagus with sesame-seed dressing, a lettuce-and-cucumber salad, and a warm roll with a pat of butter. There was also a big glass of grape juice. When she finished laying it out, the girl turned and spoke to me with her hands: Now wipe away your tears. It’s time to eat.”

Murakami’s book has beautiful illustrations like this.

Photos © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Readerbuzz, Eileen’s Critters, and Sami’s Murals.

“The Egg and I” and Other Reading

 Rural Living in the mid-20th Century

The agony of raising chickens.

What’s an aigon-eye? As a small child I remember my mother and her sisters talking about an aigon-eye that was in a movie — another mysterious thing that I had never seen. Eventually, I learned the name of the book and later movie The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald (1907–1958). According to the preface in the above edition, the 1945 publication — unexpectedly — was wildly popular. When I saw it on the shelf of recommended reads at the library, I decided to that I would finally read it after all these years.

On the whole, it’s not a terrible book, but it’s very dated, especially the author’s appalling racist views of the Native Americans who lived around her in the Pacific Northwest where she and her husband had a farm. I have no idea if this was the first humorous family memoir about the difficulties of being a farm wife or about some other family challenges. I know that other similar memoirs were popular at around that time; for example, Cheaper by the Dozen, published shortly afterwards, and I Remember Mama, a play and movie in the late 1940s. It’s still a popular genre, for example Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water. You can probably think of many more, both humorous and serious.

Betty MacDonald’s narrative offers lots of supercilious discussions about uncouth but generous and well-meaning neighbors, lots of self-congratulatory descriptions of extremely hard work raising farm animals including despised chickens, and lots and lots of purportedly good-natured complaining. All this passes for humor. I guess I’ll skip the movie.

The Author’s Other Books

Here’s the biggest surprise: Betty MacDonald was also the author of a series of wonderful books that I remember fondly from my childhood. Our teachers read them to us and we eventually read them to ourselves. I never connected, until this week, that this author also wrote Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and the sequel Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic. (Now I see that the cover of the first edition of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle actually did mention The Egg and I, but it never made an impression on me then.) Life can be very strange, can’t it. 

In case you haven’t read the books, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle taught kids to behave themselves by hilariously unorthodox rewards or punishments. One that sticks in my memory was the time she caused seeds to sprout in the very dirty ears of a girl who never washed (but learned her lesson). I was amused, but also annoyed at the preachiness that teachers expressed when reading to us, but I recall that on the whole, everyone loved these books. I’ll keep my happy memories by not rereading the books.

Backyard Birds in the Twenty-First Century

Amy Tan, a great author, has documented how she became a birder.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a very pleasant read.

Her sketches and notes delighted me.

Her description reminded me of several places where we have fed hummingbirds by hand.
(From our December, 2024, trip to Trinidad and Tobago).

I was surprised that she wrote about never seeing a hummingbird nest. I especially thought about this very daring bird that lived on electricity in Costa Rica. (Date: January 1, 2024).
As I read, being reminded of birds and birding from my experience contributed to my enjoyment of Tan’s book.

Amy Tan constantly tries to please her avian customers with delicious treats!

I love owls, as does Amy Tan, and I admired her beautiful sketches of them.

Of course Amy Tan’s descriptions made me think of owls I have seen.
(Owl in Costa Rica, December 2023)

Reviews © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters and Deb’s Readerbuzz.