Finding Fire leaves me speechless. Well, almost. This picture book by Logan S. Kline is wonderful, and it has almost no words in it at all.

The first page reads, “Long before the secrets of fire had been discovered, people had to find fire. And if they lost it… if it went out…someone would need to search for more.”

The fire near the mouth of the cave has been put out by a terrible rainstorm. The cave family is arguing about who will go to search for new fire. The little boy with the wild red hair puts his hand up. When he crosses the river in front of their cave, you can tell which woman and man are his parents by their terrified faces.

Our hero has a bag, a piece of fur for warmth, and a spear. He trudges through a scary landscape complete with animals that want to eat him. He falls and hurts one leg, and then hears something. There is a baby wooly mammoth caught in a bog. Our boy holds out his spear, blunt end first, and the wooly mammoth wraps his trunk around it. Pull! Pull! Whew! Rescued!

They set off together. There is a thunderstorm and a wonderful picture of the lightning strike. Hurry to find something still burning next morning. Find it, go through a heck of a time getting it home. The picture of them in the river, swimming towards land has my heart in my throat. They win through, and there is fire in the hearth again. And the two friends, boy and baby mammoth, sit together in front of the blaze. Wonderful book! Find Finding Fire in the Children’s Department of the Pine Bush Area Public Library, in time for the Summer Reading Program called Unearth A Story.

Around New York State, Wooly Mammoth and Mastodon bones have been dug up. There was even a discovery, last year, in Scotchtown. See Mastodon bones in the local museums and in the New York State Museum in Albany. Dig deep and Unearth A Story.

An Irish Country Welcome by Patrick Taylor – June 2026

There is too much going on in Pine Bush Area Public Library’s copy of An Irish Country Welcome. There’s a talent show on July 5, 1969 in Ballybuckleboo. One of the characters in the book has a stroke, at the end of the show. Thank goodness there’s a doctor in the house.

Because this is in Northern Ireland, the “Troubles” really get going, that year, and they would go on for thirty years in real life. In the fiction books, Patrick Taylor downplayed the “troubles” until near the end of his series. He does not let them overwhelm Welcome.

Dr. Fingal O’Reilly and Dr. Barry Laverty hire a new man to join their medical practice. Dr. Sebastian Carson is always running off, as soon as work is over. Is he feckless and irresponsible, or does his family have a dark secret? Barry’s best friend, Jack Mills, want to marry a Catholic woman, and won’t that cause an explosion in the Protestant Mills family?

Dr. O’Reilly and his wife Kitty meet her unofficial niece to show her the Giant’s Causeway, on the Irish coast. Dr. Barry Laverty and his wife Sue are going to be parents but isn’t there always something going wrong?

Like I said, there is too much going on in An Irish Country Welcome. I read and reread it anyway, because I cannot look away. People in the book will tell you that “a baby brings its own welcome.” And this series of books is very welcoming. Come back to the village of Ballybucklebo in time for the talent show. You will be glad you did.

With all the shenanigans going on in the tiny village of Ballybucklebo, in Northern Ireland, I am surprised the doctors have any time to practice medicine. It is 1967 and the Grand National Horse Race is being televised from England. Mrs. Auchinleck, the doctor’s housekeeper, has second sight and knows which horse is going to win. She normally would not bet, using her power, but knows that someone in the village is going to need a large amount of money, very soon. (That second sight again.) She treats it as a duty, and puts her winnings away until needed. An Irish Country Practice by Patrick Taylor, is a very busy book.

Dr. Fingal O’Reilly keeps wondering, is the money needed by Eileen who is ill and is a single mother with three children? By Anne whose lung trouble may turn out to be cancer? By that arch-schemer Donal Donnelly who, in trying to support his growing family, has been caught poaching pheasants out of season? Dr. O’Reilly has to sew up Donal’s cut hand at 2 in the morning, after Donal is nabbed by the local constable.

Dr. O’Reilly’s brother Lars is allergic to the puppy that his girlfriend gave him. Lars is no fool. He invites O’Reilly and his wife Kitty to see the dog, and of course, Kitty says they will take the puppy. Fingal O’Reilly is stuck with a new dog. Fortunately, his old dog, Arthur Guinness, starts to train the pup immediately. That will be a happy ending.

We’re not sure there will be a happy ending when another doctor, Barry Laverty, lets it out that he isn’t sure about having children. His fiancée, Sue, does not appreciate hearing him blurt out ‘Why anybody, anybody in their right mind would have a brood of bloody rug rats is utterly beyond me.’ Although, he does have a good reason to say it. But is their engagement over?

Well, you’ll just have to go to Ireland to-woops, I mean you will have to pick up Pine Bush Library’s copy of An Irish Country Practice and find out. And keep an eye open for who gets that wad of cash, from the horse racing. And why it turns out to be a very good thing, indeed. Is it the luck of the Irish?

April is the right month for Dark Cloud Strong Breeze. April is the month for rain and wind. Susan Patron wrote the verses, and Peter Catalanotto painted the pictures in this children’s book from Pine Bush Area Public Library. Put on your raincoat, before you turn the pages. You’re going to get wet.

Daddy has locked his keys in the car, and there is a storm coming on. The background of the pictures is in black, white, gray and tan, and shows the line of businesses, including a drycleaners where Daddy and the little girl have been. Next are paint and wallpaper, the market and the important locksmith. Why Daddy does not go to the locksmith and offer to pay, I do not know. It is the little girl, in a red raincoat, who has to open negotiations.

Will the locksmith help her? “Yes, says Locksmith, clicka-me clong/ If you get a guard, both brave and strong.” Meanwhile, there is a German shepherd, getting into the neighbor’s garbage can. Dog will help if the girl provides a “shelter, dry and warm.” She goes to the market to get boxes to make a shelter, and asks help from the grocer who is having a mouse problem. She talks to a cat, and then a butterfly, and the only one who does not ask for something is the butterfly. The center of each picture, including the dancing butterfly, is in color. Then the rain comes down.

Everybody gets what they bargained for, grocer, cat, dog and locksmith, who ends up with the German shepherd guarding his store. The locksmith helps out, and “The car gets unlocked, jangle-me jome/ The car gets unlocked, and we drive home.” Just when you think it’s happily ever after, “Dark cloud strong breeze/Oops! Daddy’s looking for his other keys.”

Our girl is on top of the problem, because she has a house key on a string around her neck. Her father would really be in trouble without her! So read this dancing poem with pictures, and get out your umbrella.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! There are several books about pirates in the Adult Services non-fiction section of the Pine Bush Area Library. The more I read of David Cordingly’s book, the more I want to read. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates flows right along. David Cordingly worked at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England for twelve years. He organized the exhibition, “Pirates: Fact and Fiction” which was terribly popular.

Cordingly’s first chapter is “Wooden Legs and Parrots.” He talks about R.L. Stevenson’s most famous book. “The effect of Treasure Island on our perception of pirates cannot be overestimated. Stevenson linked pirates forever with maps, schooners, tropical islands and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders.”

The reality is not as much fun. In “Plundering the Treasure Forts” find “…the bands of privateers and adventurers who came to be known as the buccaneers. Driven out of their inland hunting grounds on Hispaniola by Spanish soldiers, the uncouth men who lived there… migrated to the north coast of Hispaniola. There they were joined by a mixed bunch of runaway slaves, deserters, escaped criminals, and religious refugees.”

Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, Calico Jack and the horrible Bartholomew Roberts and others are found throughout the book, and some have chapters all their own. Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and the Irish Grace O’Malley are written about in “Women Pirates and Pirates’ Women.” That chapter also talks about “the Chinese pirate Mrs. Cheng, whose fleets of ships ruled the South China Sea in the early years of the nineteenth century.” There’s more here than I expected.

Other chapters include “Into Action Under the Pirate Flag,” “Storms, Shipwrecks and Life at Sea,” “Pirate Islands and Other Haunts” and the gruesome “Torture, Violence and Marooning.” I could not finish that chapter. Eventually it comes to “Hunting Down the Pirates” and it grinds to a halt. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t fun.

David Cordingly writes in his “Afterword” that “The fact is that we want to believe in the world of the pirates as it has been portrayed in the adventure stories, the plays and the films over the years. We want the myths, the treasure maps, the buried treasure, the walking the plank, the resolute pirate captains with their cutlasses and earrings, and the seamen with their wooden legs and parrots. We prefer to forget…the desperate plight of men shipwrecked on hostile coasts. For most of us the pirates will always be romantic outlaws living far from civilization on some distant sunny shore.”

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done for the rest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!