jbellomy's reviews
467 reviews

As noted by others, the parallel Berwald draws between her daughter's mental illness and the plight of corals is a stretch at best, downright exploitative at worst. I'm all for a nonfiction writer being a character (even the protagonist) in their own work, but it's so clunkily done here. I had to take a break from this book for a while because I was getting so annoyed with the parent plot, especially after the awful moment when they do too much exposure therapy too quickly and Isy is screaming and crying on the ground FOR HOURS and Berwald is like "whoops!" Like, girl, I picked this up to learn about coral, not to hear about what an awful parent you are or how much it pains you that your kid needs accommodations (why was Berwald so disgusted by Isy using screenshots to complete her school work?! It was a solution! Progress! And yet she was like "every time I heard that screenshot noise was another dagger in my heart" -- weird and gross reaction, Juli! No wonder your daughter lied to you while she was in the throes of mental illness!!), and it was pissing me off so much that I had to suffer through all that in order to learn about coral.

Other than that: the book was obsessed with capitalist solutions to capitalist problems, which, like, fair, given where we are, but it was distracting to spend pages upon pages describing the charitable pursuits of the Mars company and Iberostar and not acknowledge that you're basically writing a giant ad for these corporations. Berwald's enthusiasm for the science comes across and she's very easy to read, if trite at times. (A few ROUGH metaphors come to mind. Also--you're telling me that you went to grad school for marine science and didn't know that corals can be hermaphroditic?! I quite literally don't believe you. The "author as audience stand-in" archetype doesn't work when the writer has a PhD in the topic.) The section about covid and BLM might have worked in the hands of a more deft writer, but as it is, it feels ham-fisted, silly, and borderline offensive.

Cool topic, mediocre-to-bad book, will not continue reading her even though I love marine biology.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

4.5

I will be alone in my apartment crying for the foreseeable future

The Swallows by Lisa Lutz

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3.5

the parallel thinking between this and

the world cannot give

🤯

The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton