A review by unfiltered_fiction
Sea Bean by Sally Huband

emotional hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

3.75

Sea Bean reckons with profoundly difficult questions about the way we live, ranging from the macro (the climate emergency) to the micro (the author's experience of chronic illness) in terms of social scales, and encountering each of these challenges with the same depth. The loss of a single seal cub swept out to sea is recorded with the same resonant grief as the author describes the almost or entirely complete loss of species on the islands she calls home. It is a moving, intelligent read. I sometimes felt that it struggled a little to maintain momentum, and had to put it down for a while. When I returned to it, I found I was most able to engage with the chapters where the focal theme was more clearly presented. The author often takes side tracks and circular routes in her writing, which took me a little getting used to, but says something provocative about how practises such as beachcombing defy modern expectations of linear routes and answers which can only be right or wrong.