I’ve been interested in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for some time now. Finally I checked it out from the local library and, now that I’ve completed the spellbinding page-turner The Game of Kings, I am knee deep (or perhaps ankle deep is more accurate) in the story of the Kingsolver-Hopp Family’s year of eating locally. On this first day of spring, I find myself nodding in recognition at the author’s description of her own spring thaw: “I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun, where the needles that pierced me began to melt all as one.”

As a mom, I couldn’t help but laugh when her youngest daughter, on the following page, refers to jonquils as tranquils.

There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how these things go. In our family, those pink birds with the long necks are called flingmos because of how their real name was cutely jumbled by my brother’s youngest child—and that was, yikes, twenty years ago.

So will we always call worms cutie pies after Liv’s pet phrase?

**Though I highly recommend The Game of Kings, the first in the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett, I should include a warning: it took me a very long time to get invested in the story. The only reason I pushed through was that Bryonie and Haley loved the books—so I knew the novel deserved my full attention. Though the first half seemed beyond my reading skill and I felt fairly lost, my perseverance was rewarded by the fast-paced, intriguing story-telling of the latter half. Now I’m off to find book two in the series.