As a narrative of the wild, The Light of Wilder Things: A Teenager’s Search for Nature and Wildlife presents us with a bit of what we expect: detailed descriptions of various insects and animals, stunning photographs and curious sketches, but even more so it provides us with what we don’t expect: a depiction of the intimacies between people, geographies and creatures that we have somehow chosen to unsee in our times.

Ishan Shanavas’s account of his teenagehood offers an opening into how we think about memoir writing. It is a book that considers the natural world of plants, animals (big and small), insects, and birds as the landscape through which the author explores his interiority. His earnest curiosity, fueled from his childhood by his parents, frames every tale he recounts of his brush with the natural world. Indeed, in the foreword to the book, environmental historian and professor Mahesh Rangarajan says that a “sense of wonder about living things has been a hallmark of some of the finest minds of our age” and it is that very sense of wonder which allows Ishan to take us, not just into different parts of his life, but into the wild itself. The book offers a curious nook in...

Read more