“I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird is an elegant memoir of devotion and imagination inviting us to extend our compassion and sense of family to all species on this beautiful, broken planet we call home. This book is an awakening.”

“With astonishing grace, insight, and power, Susan Cerulean has written a memoir of such delicate balance and wisdom that it will forever have a hallowed place on your bookshelf. Daughter, wife, environmentalist, explorer, caretaker of humans and seashores, in I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Susan offers up vital truths just when we need them most.”

“Single Bird is a beautiful and significant book: With compassion, keen insights, and elegant prose, Cerulean celebrates our inherent and intractable relationship with the natural world, and explores the strange paradox of humanity’s disconnections.”

Joe Hutto
naturalist, wildlife artist
Author of Touching the Wild, A Light in High Places, and Illumination in the Flatwoods

“Excellent piece by one of the finest nature writers in America.”

“Cerulean takes readers inside the real Florida, her own little piece of heaven on northern Florida’s Gulf coast. She introduces the plants, animals, insects and people who have called this area home for the last few hundred years and explains the changes the area is going through due to climate change, overcrowding, loss of habitat and overfishing. The writing is never preachy or accusatory, and Cerulean blends information with stories of the trips she and her husband take to enjoy the natural beauty of the area. If you think Florida is nothing more than theme parks and spring break parties, think again. Cerulean introduces readers to the real Florida, a land of fierce natural beauty that is in danger of disappearing forever.”

The Book Lover’s Best Friend
Cayo Costa, Florida

“Susan, I loved, loved reading your book “Coming to Pass.” Thank you for bringing such fine work into the world. I learned so much from your lyrical & intelligent writing and I cheer your action as well as your call to action!”

Sue Gambill
Tallahassee

“Susan is an incredibly fine nature writer and has such a soulful, blazing light.  She is a muse.  I love her ability to transcribe the essence of experience and connect souls with the need of place.  David Moynahan is magnificent in capturing subtleties of emotion in the images he creates, such intricate beauty, affecting visceral response and awe. Both are truly inspirational bioregionalists. Bravo !!!”

Dave Borland
National Ecological Observatory Network

“At the start of her heartbreakingly beautiful book Coming to Pass, the author Susan Cerulean asks: “How do we find the courage to live on the edge of certain impermanence and yet never give up trying to fiercely protect the…beautiful inventions of the Earth?”

In Coming to Pass, Susan Cerulean gives us a courageous book written out of her fierce love of what she calls “the living world,” a book from the mind and heart of a truly gifted scientist, naturalist, writer, and human being. Her magical descriptions of shore and sand, seabirds and turtles, are a poetry of the wild. Her account of the damage we humans are inflicting not just on the Florida Gulf Coast but to the Earth itself has all the more impact because of the author’s intimate understanding of what that damage is truly costing us and her moral vision of our interconnections in the web of life. Cerulean dreams and receives wisdom from the animals and birds of her region, from the sea and land itself—and transmits that wisdom to all of us who are implicated in the book’s final question: “What will you do to help this life continue?”

Miriam Greenspan
Psychotherapist and author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: the Wisdom of Grief, Fear, & Despair

“Cerulean combines a poetic gift of expression, a naturalist’s keen eye and deep knowledge, and a lover’s passion for life. Coming to Pass is both an exuberant and intriguing  celebration of a treasured landscape and an eloquent plea for people to change their ways so that these ecosystems and the precious species they contain might continue. A wonderful book—I only wish I could have put it down and gone out to take a walk on the beach with the author.”

Roger S. Gottlieb
Author of A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet’s Future and Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming