dckathleen's reviews
268 reviews

This is an interesting overview of the eight existing bear species on earth. Human impact on habitat and climate are obviously beg factors hurting bears.

One note is that the audiobook narrator made some weird errors that actually had me looking up whether this was read by AI, but it was a real person. It didn't ruin the book for me, but I did think it was strange that nobody caught this. A few examples: The year 1254 was read "twelve thousand 54" and the year 2100 was read, "two thousand one hundred." The word archipelago was read incorrectly once, and correctly a few other times. The Thames River was mispronounced. 

I volunteer for a wildlife rehab center, and love working with the turtles. This Sy Montgomery book on turtles is really about turtle rehab and about the pandemic a little bit, but mostly turtles. I love her writing because she does hands on work and research and then makes them very readable. In this book she works with a turtle rehab in Massachusetts, and learns about what turtles face in the wild and how they are both tough and fragile. She also visits a facility where extremely endangered turtles are raised, saves cold shocked sea turtles on Cape Cod, and learns about different measures for protecting turtles. Several times she talks about people not caring for turtles properly. Montgomery doesn't flinch away from terrible injuries and illness and doesn't sugarcoat things... anyone familiar with animal rehab work won't be shocked, but this might not be for everyone. 

One thing that I thought was fascinating is that she talks about how turtles perceive time, including their inability to see fast things, like cars. A car driving looks to them the way a hummingbird wing looks to us.

This is extraordinary.

This is a quick read, but really good. The author goes through quite a few animals from bats to pangolins, and seahorses to raccoons to talk about what makes them extraordinary and how they are faring around people (spoiler, not great). One point that I think is excellent and worth making whenever possible is that we have never discovered that an animal is less complex than we anticipated. I would have happily kept reading.

I read this with my son. It's over 500 pages, but a large number of those pages are beautiful illustrations which carry the story forward between pages with words. It's the story of a boy in the 1930s who lives in the walls of a train station in Paris and maintains the clocks while also being obsessed with an automaton that is the last thing he has left from his father. This is a sad and beautiful story of lost and found family.

A family reunion on a small isolated island goes terribly wrong. Family members start to die, but the island will be cut off for hours to come. This reads like a million other closed room murder mystery books, but has a great twist.

Really excellent! Parallel stories of talented women who fall for men who expect to be put first. One woman's life ends, and is nearly forgotten until the second rediscovers her. 

Mystery about an orphan and a police officer solving a crime together. Easy read. 

This was fun and fluffy. Two very old ladies seem sweet and maybe a bit forgetful. We learn about their lives and the ways that they spent WW2 and the years afterwards. It was charming. 

Intertwined stories about Dominican families, and their struggles told through an author's cemetery for stories which never got to be told.