Lovingly illustrated by her granddaughter Mary Ingalls Coté, May Brailsford’s delightful memoir tells the story of growing up in a village where everyone knew everyone else and a little girl’s spirit could soar. If Laura Ingalls Wilder had lived on the coast of South Carolina, this is the book she would have written. May climbed the Cape Romain lighthouse and swam at a bathing house by the wharf, dodging a little boy who tried to sneak a peek. She grew into a spunky, self-reliant woman who in the 1930s headed a crew that planted live oaks, crepe myrtle, dogwoods, and wisteria along the main roads of her village. She taught herself to paint at the age of 62 and achieved renown for her bold, “primitive” renderings of live oaks, magnolia blossoms, and coastal scenes. “By the time I was five,” remembers May Morrison Brailsford in this memoir of growing up on the South Carolina coast, “I could sail a boat and swim and catch more crabs than anybody—bogging or with a line.”