Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The living world has a new and sprightly champion in Leach, winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. In her first collection of essays, gracefully illustrated by Nate Christopherson in the mode of Barry Moser and Rockwell Kent, Leach is nimble, precise, dynamic, witty, and metaphysical. She writes of wondrously adaptive goats, penguins enduring blizzards to protect what may well be a stone instead of an egg, and tiny warblers who travel thousands of miles. Leach discerns the pea plant's yearning for connection as it sends out its searching tendrils and compares bamboo-dependent pandas to penitents. In her heady and astute approach to natural history, her disarming concoctions of science and fancy, she is part Diane Ackerman, part Margaret Atwood. Also a bluegrass musician, she writes delectably rhythmic, singing sentences. Here be dragons, water lilies, jellyfish, and spiritual quests. Leach looks to the heavens, too, considering with high imagination the forces that shape stars and galaxies. Even as she fashions a bit of bluesy satire to decry our abuse of nature, Leach is ecstatic in her knowledgeable, resplendent, and exhilarating contemplations of everything from subatomic particles to dust, Spinoza, donkeys, and caterpillars.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first book, illustrated by Nate Christopherson, Whiting Award-winner Leach has produced a collection of creative nonfiction essays that unfortunately comes across as twee. The recipe: animate inanimate objects, personify animals, add a dash of hypothetical wonder, throw in hard facts, end your essay with a question, and presume connections between the tangible and ephemeral. Repeat. While Leach is able to create moments of verbal delight ("Who can twig the intricated soul of the pirouetting bird?"), her forays into pop philosophy prove less effective: "But... who... who... does not miss everything?" Essays such as "Warbler Delight" are more successful, especially when Leach's sense of wonder matches the small feats of the subject. However, other diatribes of delight border on the obvious and insubstantial. Allowing for too many authorial indulgences, Leach's extreme individuality veers into inscrutability. B&w illus. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
