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.
She does have lots and lots of little nuggets of information about all the creatures she encounters too. I was absolutely impressed with the depth of knowledge each of the people she met had. Most of the science-y things in the book come from all the people that she met and they were incredibly interesting. It really did make me want to book a camping trip in Tennessee to see fireflies and also book a moth tour. What she writes about is extremely interesting and inspiring to learn more about what goes on in the dark. I suppose I was more interested in all the creatures and facts about the creatures than the stories about herself that she included.
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 3.5/5 stars - definitely put yourself on the waiting list for this book from the library.
No comments:
Post a Comment