This is a book about the life and choices of Margaret Roach, Editorial Editor for Martha Stewart Living’s Omnimedia, a New York Times editor and a gardening book editor, a woman who had everything but felt unfulfilled.

In July 2008, Margaret decides to leave her high-powered job and Manhattan city home and move to Copake Falls, a small hamlet in New York State, which was her weekend home. The book follows her decision and what happened following that decision.

Calling herself a work in progress, Margaret moves in and spends the first weeks mostly sitting, wondering how she will fill in her time. Then came (a) the needed repairs to her home and learning the hard work to do repairs; (b) making a garden and keeping it free from marauding squirrels, foxes and other wildlife; (c) coping with electrical storms, power outages, more rain than needed, and lots of snow during the winter.

A big step for Margaret was overcoming her phobia of snakes – especially the ones who wanted to share her home with her. Also, not being a cat person, Margaret finds herself adopted by a very large black and white cat named Jack.

The book contains passages about her relationship with Jack and, by the end of the book, Margaret clutches Jack to her and says, “I can’t believe how much I love you.”

Margaret shares that she gets enjoyment from the frogs in her frog pond and the birds in her trees. Margaret does find peace in the country as she relaxes into the yearly seasons, cultivating patience through her connection with nature and enjoying solitude.

This book is funny, moving, inspirational, and joyously written.

“Eating Dirt” is a beautiful, absorbing and knowledgeable book written by a dedicated tree planter. Gill’s language conveys the life of tree planters with both word images and facts:

“Very early morning in February on Vancouver Island, the sun comes up weakly in a sky dark and swollen with rain. We fall out of our beds driven by a mutual urgency and dress in our clothes still crusted with the grime of yesterday. Promptly at seven we climb into an old Ford pickup truck to be driven to our assigned area of the day. And begin planting our seedlings to start the reforesting of our ruthlessly clear-cut land. Today only one-third of the world’s original forests remain.”

“Most of us are young, here to make money, a lot of it in a hurry. Twenty-five cents for every seedling planted. From February until October every day we plant seedlings, leaving camp at dawn and returning at dusk to eat our food and fall into our cots, still wearing wet muddy clothes. Too tired to wash or change. Some of us, most of us, stay. When the new group arrives, it doesn’t take long to size up who will stay the term.”

“Planting trees isn’t hard work but the complications are very hard: rain, wind, snow pellets, clouds of furious biting insects, venomous plants like stinging nettles, hornets, leeches and ticks, bears, hornets and sunburn.”

Gill’s writing is very descriptive about the landscape, vegetation and sky. Her language is so eloquent that the reader is transported to the land, breathing in the smell of woods, moss, and old and new vegetation.

Throughout the book, Gill also describes her tree planting tribe, from the single mom to the two oldsters, men in their fifties. She also reveals the tensions in their relationships with each other and with their bosses.

Gill’s passion for tree planting is almost palpable. One particular paragraph clearly describes what she sees as the gift of a job others might find horrible:

“Some people think planting trees is as boring and crazy making as stuffing envelopes or climbing a Stairmaster. I love my job for exactly the opposite reason, because it is so full of things. There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field that it is often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest does to climbers. It has a way of filling up a life with verbs that push into one another, with no idle space in between. So that you just can’t believe all the things you saw or all the living beings that brushed past your skin.”

P’lovers next book is “And I Shall find some Peace There”, Margaret Roach – $16.50.

In a land that no longer has any live trees, Banyan and his father are ‘treebuilders’, hired by rich people looking for an escape for the desolate landscape. Working together, they made sculptures that looked like trees and forests, from scrap metal and salvaged junk. Now, at 17, Banyan is alone as his mother deserted them when he was small and his father had disappeared a year before the book begins.

Banyan has never seen a real tree. Locusts destroyed trees and vegetation over a century ago. The only crop remaining is corn and even that is scarce and must be used for food as well as fuel. As well, few books remain because people have burned them to keep warm during ‘the darkness’ and there are no trees to produce any more paper.

Banyan believes his father is still alive and is determined to find him. He’s been told his father is in a place where wild things and plants and real trees still grow. Along the way, he meets many characters, never quite knowing if they are friend or foe. The author of ‘Rootless’ creates a number of bizarre and suspenseful adventures. These adventures, along with the well-defined characters, produce lots of tension between Banyan and everyone he meets as he hunts for his father. The ending is strong and surprising in every way. Rootless is the first of three novels in this trilogy and so readers will be eager to see what happens next!

Rootless is Chris Howard’s first novel. It’s a lively read, it holds the reader’s interest, and always compels the reader to move on to the next chapter.

Our next book is ‘Eating Dirt’ by Charlotte Gill – $19.95

Anthill is a beautifully written novel about the ingenuity of nature and the nature of humanity. It is also a coming of age novel about a young boy, Raff, who grows up in rural Alabama and who spends lots of his time in a nearby nature preserve. With the encouragement of some key adults in his life, he becomes an environmental lawyer and is taken on by an established and conservative law firm in his hometown. He learns how to walk a fine line between assisting the law firm and saving his beloved wilderness area from rampant development.

Woven deftly into the storyline are extensive descriptions of the nature and life cycles of ants – life and death, creation of habitat and aggressive takeovers. But we also see what happens to ants when mankind intentionally poisons them. It is quite possible that the author included such details to serve as a metaphor for the diversity of humanity and how people live, create, multiply and destroy.

Anthill is a powerful tale of ant empires and people empires written by this prize-winning and prominent naturalist. E.O. Wilson has given readers an inspiring novel about ants, land developers, environmentalists and preachers in rural Alabama.

Frank MacDonald writes about what he knows – the people, community and politics of small town Cape Breton. This novel starts with a death and winds its way through 60 years of history into the kind of tangle that occurs when old resentments and fears come face-to-face with present-day differences around environmental preservation and economic development.

Mrs. Big Sandy (and her husband Big Sandy) are central characters, even though Big Sandy dies at the beginning of the book. Big Sandy’s funeral filled the church and the front page of the local paper, ‘The Shean Witness’. Father Eddie Walker’s eulogy skirted the facts of Big Sandy’s life to dwell upon the historic significance of his passing which centres around what will happen to the family home and the land on which it sits.

Another key character is David Cameron who is the current Editor of the town’s newspaper. Cameron had recently returned to Cape Breton with his wife, Alexandra, and children, Tony and Mary, for a summer vacation from his job with a Toronto newspaper. He decided to make his life in his hometown of Shean, wanting his children to have a childhood in the small community. Alexandra, his wife, returned to Toronto to her job, planning to have the children visit during vacations.

Add to the list of important characters a young woman, Rita MacDonald, who recently left her dream job as a cruise ship nurse to come home to Shean to look after her father, Ronald MacDonald after he had a stroke.

David begins to hear unsettling bits of gossip around the town mostly at The Gulf Grill where the local people gather for coffee and lunches. He and Rita uncover devious plans by unknown business people and government workers for the expropriation and destruction of Mrs. Big Sandy’s house, the building of a seawall and plans to begin strip mining for coal.

When all this is exposed to the towns’ people in ‘The Witness’, the townspeople become divided, some wanting new construction and jobs and some wanting to maintain the town as it is. Old grievances imagined or real come to the surface but a crisis of a house fire – which sends David’s children to Hospital, helps new friendships develop and long held feelings of wrongdoing and resentment heal.

This novel is a great yarn and, while fiction, sounds very familiar to some of the current issues many small towns are facing when development is pitted against environmental protection.

This is a fabulous first novel and we are already hoping for a second!

‘Lily Lake Road, North Mountain, Nova Scotia. Islands of quiet remain, where we can hear bird songs and the air smells sweet, but they are shrinking.I have found one in the woods where I feel safe. I moved here because this was far from the rest of civilization-from Boston, New York, Toronto and I had grown weary of a world that didn’t make sense.’

Mr. Fotheringham takes the reader between the tranquil backwoods life in rural Nova scotia and the gritty urban life of New York City.

‘The calendar said the summer had ended but waves of heat rose from the pavement of New York anyway, enveloping Benny as she walked home from her grad School lab. I came to this school to learn how to rid the planet of plastic. When our grandparents were kids, there were no plastic bags, no yogurt containers, no six pack rings, nothing.’

In both the chapters on living on Lily Lake Road and the chapters on living in New York City, the characters are so genuine the reader feels he knows them. The main character himself, who has escaped urban life, in search of some peace; Martin and Jen, neighbours, who help with the homestead; Art , living on his own now that his wife has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home; Lina pitching her tent near the fire circle, bringing the wisdom of her first nations ancestry.

And as the reader moves through the worlds of the locations and the characters, the reader wonders ‘What is the connection between the main character’s living on the land and Benny’s life in New York City, doing research to develop a bacteria to eat plastic?’  The author keeps this tension until near the end of his novel and the ending is not without questions and not without hope.

Scott Fotheringham holds a PHD in molecular biology and genetics and has co-authored many scientific articles about genetically engineered fungi, bacteria and fruit flies. His knowledge perfectly enables him to bring credible realism to ‘The Rest is Silence’.  A book not to be missed!

This book is a graphic novel…which is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art, either in experimental design or in traditional comics format.

Artist and storyteller Rachael Hope Allison tells the story of what happens when we casually throw away our trash and she brings to life the plight of our oceans in this moving graphic novel.  Her delicate art shows us that when even just one plastic bag is thrown away and is carried by wind, it can find its way to an ocean.

An excellent foreword is provided by Jeff Corwin, a biologist who has work with endangered species and ecosystems all over the world.  He describes the amount and diversity of unwanted material we produce and discard every day. Globally, humankind discards,on our planet Earth, about 5 billion tons of trash each year.  The book ends with additional information about ocean debris and threatened marine life along with suggestions as to how we can help to reduce our footprint on the world’s oceans.

Given the format and the message, this is a book for all ages.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is both a beautiful and inspiring book with amazing pictures of people who are working to save extraordinary endangered species of our land, water and air.

Each chapter is about a unique animal or bird or fish and is divided into paragraphs outlining facts of their habitat, their life habits and why it is important to preserve this species. And for each species, there is a picture of the wild life hero who is working to save that particular species along with their education and the reason they have chosen to do the important work they are doing.

For instance, Nguyen Van Thai, with a graduate certificate from the University of Kent in Britain, is a resident of Vietnam. As a young boy growing up in Northern Vietnam, most families didn’t have much and hunted wild meat to feed their families. Thai was very sad when he saw two people from his village attack an “Asian Pangolin’s” burrow, knowing that the captured pangolins would be going into the cooking pot!

Pangolins in Vietnam are endangered. Two other Asian species of pangolins and two of the African Pangolin species are classified as Near Threatened. Pangolins play a critical role in natural insect control, especially ants and termites, saving humans millions of dollars in pest damage, reducing the need for harmful chemicals. As well, pangolin burrows provide shelter for some rodents and reptiles.

Ngugen Van Thai is just one of forty conservationists profiled in this book, along with the species they are committed to preserving. It is likely that the reader will learn of species never heard of before. These inspiring people are not only trying to save these species, but through their work they are also working on related and crucial wild life issues: climate change; fire; wild life consumption and wild life disease; habitant loss; and ocean degradation.

This is both a ‘feel good’ book in terms of knowing how hard people are working to conserve things which are endangered but also a ‘worry’ book as one realizes all that is at stake if we do not find ways to help these heroes.