I hear the birds in the morning these days, but the temperatures still are in the 40s. Hmmmm, this is not a very merry month of May in the New York area. This weekend I am taking a welcome break to guaranteed warm weather as I head to Grand Cayman and Coral Gables to participate in book club events for Books & Books, one of my favorite independent bookstores. In Grand Cayman, Lisa See, the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love, will be the author guest. I had the pleasure of hearing Lisa speak at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with her mom, Carolyn See (author The Handyman, among other titles) last month. Their dialogue was such fun that I felt like I was sitting across the kitchen table from them. You can read more about my adventures at the book festival here and here, as I wrote two blogs about this trip. I know Lisa is close to completing her next book, and I hope to have more to share with you about it next month.

Last night I attended an author event at the Clinton Book Shop, which is located near my home in New Jersey, where Elizabeth Noble was reading from and talking about her new book, Things I Want My Daughters to Know. Many of you know Elizabeth from her previous books The Reading Group, The Friendship Test and Alphabet Weekends. One of my favorite moments of the evening came when a woman in the audience mentioned that she and her husband were going to be empty nesters in the near future, and they were embarking on their own version of the adventures based on the alphabet adventures in Alphabet Weekends.