Alice's Adventures in Wonderland meets Vesper Flights in this whimsically melodic collection of animal based essays. Amy Leach and her ensemble will undoubtedly win you over with bouts of incredulous laughter and many moments of awe. If everyone should lend them an ear, we'd all care a little more and learn a lot too.
This is the kind of gentle and lyrical ecotone I wish I could write, and one that everyone on planet Earth should definitely read! The essays on Fireflies and the Southern Cassowary were my personal favorites, but each animal and anecdote left me with something new: A deep nostalgia for my own mud-caked and grass-coated childhood; An urge to protect the places and creatures that help us find such solace, and to defend the people denied that comfort because of prejudice; A plethora of Did-you-know's to break out in random conversations and a heightened appreciation for bright colors--the brighter the better! Without a doubt, I will be returning to this collection for the humor, hope, and understanding elicited by Nezhukumatathil's experiences, but also for Fumi Nakamura's original art (which I honestly want to have printed on my walls)!
I love this book because Louv doesn’t lecture the reader. The focus is not on what we might be doing wrong, but on all the ways humans and other animals have done well together—and why. It covers childhood pets, wild encounters, studies of our mutual makeup, ways of communicating, and more! If anything, this combination of diverse anecdotes and research encourages awe and open observation when we connect with nature, and an acknowledgement of the benefits therein.
Is it absurd to use a domesticated crow and his blood hound sidekick to tell the story of a zombie apocalypse? Or just absurd that no one has ever thought to create such a hilariously profane avian hero, in the midst of an identity crisis and spurred on by a love for Cheetos? Either way, "Hollow Kingdom" is a glorious Seattle receptacle where the movie “Zombieland” and the book “The Truth About Animals” are tossed together with the anthropomorphized voices of the urban animal kingdom. Now, my only hope is that this clever cast of characters will rescue my cat when I succumb to the pull of my phone and the audiobook read in the many voices of Robert Petkoff.
We are the duck and the mouse, the wolf is artificial scarcity resulting in desperate poverty, and the hunter is capitalism.
Give your child the gift of fun as revolutionary praxis this holiday season!
