Every year the University of Minnesota Extension Master Gardener Program does a winter book club. This year the first selection is Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion. My first thoughts on this book were pretty positive and her descriptions of all the life that happens in the dark are pretty magical. The chapters are sorted by animal and she lives in Appalachia - Boone, North Carolina - so we get a different viewpoint of the area than I feel like what is portrayed in the daily media. Plus, I didn't realize how many awesome creatures there are in her area of the world - I think I was expecting larger animals, maybe?
She starts off with fireflies and all the light that you don't know is there and starts to explain why light pollution is such a terrible thing. And yes, light pollution is not good for all the creatures at night. I found her descriptions to be pretty ethereal and magical in a fictional literature sort of way - she uses lots and lots of descriptions to take you along on her journeys through each chapter. The fireflies started off amazing and I actually researched how to find the fireflies in Appalachia, ironically enough there was an advertisement for a lightening bug tour in Appalachia in one of my travel magazines. I thought it might be a sign for some spring travel. LOL.
As the book goes on though, I'm less interested in her ethereal descriptions and more interested in the actual science of the animals in the dark. I think if you were to take out her descriptions of the shadows created by lightposts and how the dark makes her feel, it might only be a 100 page book. So just an FYI, I did end up skipping plenty of pages because I just wasn't interested in how a puddle made her feel. I also wasn't interested in her describing how she became friends with neighbors, so there's also personal stories that are mixed within (which is fine, it's her book that she wrote!), I just read the description thinking it was going to be more animal, plant, and night specific. I suppose I was disappointed in a way? To me, this book became too "new age-y" and there wasn't enough of what's going on in the dark.
Overall, the book ends up more about the author and not about what's going on in the creature world. At the end, I felt like it didn't do the "Night Magic" justice because she focused too much on describing how magic it was instead of the science of the night. I wanted more "meat and potatoes" to the night habitats that the chapters were supposed to be about instead of the author and her trips to each place she was traveling to.
I would recommend this as light reading if you're curious about night creatures. Growing up, I was afraid of the dark (and rightly so, there's big scary things out there!), this actually helps to describe all the things that go bump in the night around you when you walk outside in your yard - insects, bugs, owls, salamanders, etc... it does take the "scary" out of the dark world outside. Her way of telling what is happening when you look into the dark shadows around the light posts helps you understand that without lights, there are creatures that thrive and survive better in the dark than the light. She does inspire people to turn off their porch lights and let the animals do their animal things at night.
I think overall, between my disappoint and her way of inspiring people to actually go outside to see what's happening in the dark - I'm at a 3/5 stars, aka request it from the library so you don't feel too bad if you decide to DNF.
