"Summer Necklace: Ephemera of a Piney Woods Childhood" is a coming-of-age memoir set in 1950s East Texas. The thirty linked vignettes provide a nostalgic look at a bygone era. The book is for the young or young at heart who delight in memories of pets, pranks, and a day free to roam and who can identify with a teen longing to mature and move on. Some of the vignettes are whimsical and short, with effort in crafting as with a poem; others are longer, with a narrative tension. The vignettes proceed chronologically and culminate with the narrator's boarding the train for college.
There is a...