A review by aardwyrm
How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery

emotional hopeful informative lighthearted slow-paced

4.0

 I love a book of rambling natural history essays. I appreciate a book of quirky pet stories (hey, I was raised on James Herriot.) This seemed to be a bit of both.  I faintly recognized the author's name as "person who wrote that octopus book I keep meaning to read" and jumped in.  Reader, Sy Montgomery is bananapants bonkers in the best way.  She saves the exercise from being poisonously sweet by just being a very strange person.  A few of the essays are a bit too cutesy. The ones that are just about her pets are cotton candy, albeit nice if you like people talking a lot about how good dogs are, but  the first essay is about her childhood dog and discusses her attempts to... transform herself into a dog. It gets exponentially stranger from there. The bits where she strikes out beyond the west, you get some regrettable hints of colonial mindsets. Oh, for a natural history book without it.
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