Matthew McVickar

Enthralling and challenging. I could barely put this down—I stayed up until 1am finishing it, in fact! It moves quickly, reveals come unexpectedly, and everything feels unstable because it's hard to trust the narrator or understand what's really happening. The ending feels earned, satisfying, even restorative.

Love the style and the themes here. I should read more graphic novels.

I loved this for the first hundred pages, but the rest was a bit of a slog. And I have some issues with the way things wrapped up.

Philosophically, I absolutely resonate with the messages in this book: human progress is killing us all and the world in which we live. But:

To have Neelay's plot end with the shining hope of machine learning being humanity's way of understanding our world is boring at best, and downright irresponsible at worst. Silicon Valley and its techno-fascism is one of the most destructive forces in our world. It is not the way to a better future.

And to have some Magical Native Americans appear in the last few pages to help some white dude with his art project is eye-rollingly exploitative, especially after reading an entire book about coexisting with nature that never mentions the indigenous people who better understood and lived that existence before their genocide began centuries ago.

Also! There was a hint that Neelay might be queer, and Mimi was theoretically too, I guess, but these tiny bits of representation in an otherwise very white, straight book felt cheap.

A biological detective story differs from others in that the more you find out, the more you know you don't know.

—Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter

A fascinating look at the extended, devoted study of raven feeding behavior in the New England woods. At times I found myself drawn away from this book by more exciting novels, but I had to return to it because the investigation was interesting and Heinrich's approach was inspiring in its tenacity. He is incredibly scientific without being pedantic (for the most part), and his palpable love of nature keeps the recounting of experiments from being too dry.

Terrific, terrific, and very creepy.