One Potato Review

Scenic and sentimental. Here is a book that speaks of cramming the car full of drinks and snacks and “jars for keeping unusual bugs.” It remembers the smell of a skunk, the sight of a crawdad sleeping, of minnows racing between your legs, a store with wooden shelves stocking arrowheads and doughnuts and licorice and jars of piccalilli (“whatever that is”), milkweed collecting on a fence, graveyards, license plates. The boy (or the author), falls asleep, and when he opens his eyes it takes him a minute to figure out they are home: “That right here is where I live, and that wherever in the world we’ve been today, the only place we wanted to go was Together, just our family, and a Sunday drive in the country took us there.”