Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Atkin (Some of Us Just Fall) crafts a poignant account of her kinship with the owls near her home in England's Lake District. While walking their property one afternoon, Atkin and her partner happened upon a tawny owl and were utterly mesmerized by the "angle of her huge head as she looked down" as well as "the lushness of her feathers her still, cutting gaze." As Atkin started noticing more of the creatures on her property, including a nest of owlets, she became enamored with their strangeness and self-possession, finding in the birds a mirror for her own sense of "only-ness and difference." Reflecting on her feelings of isolation during the 2020 Covid lockdowns and her life with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body's connective tissues and can cause hypermobility, Atkins considers what lessons animals have to teach humans about solitude and belonging. "All owls are one owl when we hear them cry in the night," she writes. "Like the moon, they bring us together even as we realize our aloneness under their gaze." Pensive and deeply felt, Atkins's musings will leave readers wondering what they might learn about themselves by taking a closer look at the natural world around them. Fans of Katherine May will be charmed. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this combination bird-watching memoir/meditation on nature, Atkin (Some of Us Just Fall) writes of living amongst owls in England's Lake District, focusing on the experience of observing birds as a non-expert and noting the way landscapes and humans interact and change. With references to centuries of poetry and novels about the Lake District, the book uses the presence of owls as a throughline and an illustration of humanity's incursion on nature. It's also a personal account of disability in which Atkin explores her own capacities, through various seasons of life and phases of her chronic illness, by looking for and looking out for the owls around her home. The narrative is winding but keeps returning to the owls as Atkin makes the case that humans can come to understand themselves via nature. VERDICT A thought-provoking memoir for readers interested in natural history, disability, or the pastoral tradition in English literature. Recommend to those who enjoyed Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows.--Margaret Heller
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
One soul in an endless wood. Many nature writers describe how humans are comforted by nature: its quiet forests, its vastness, its accessibility. But Atkin, a nature writer, finds more than simple comfort in nature. Due to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissues, the author's head is disarmingly mobile on her neck, able to turn almost all the way around, like an adult owl's. Her head is often too heavy for her neck, like a baby owl's. Her thoughts, when she was young, could not coalesce into legible sentences because of the hypermobility of her oral tissues and joints, so the first language she spoke and "thought in and dreamt in, was one of my own making. I spoke and spoke, but no one recognized the words I was using….I spoke and my words fell somewhere between my mouth and the listeners' ears, like birds tumbling from flight mid-air." The bottom line, for the author, is that she sometimes feels "more like an owl than a human." This book is more deeply felt, and thus more richly described, than many. In Atkin's hands, owl parents are far more complex than depicted in science or children's tomes, their heads often bent toward each other in conversation. The same is true of their owlets, which are so precociously self-aware that they stand at attention on branches in order of their age, engaging in behaviors that are by turns "stoical, playful, courageous and continually surprising." The author's powerful connection with nature has helped her transcend both illness itself, and the alienation illness can breed. "To think I am alone is a kind of arrogance. I am one of many beings breathing in the dark. Deeper and deeper, more and more relaxed. And so the owls sing me to sleep in the end. A lullaby about insignificance. A lullaby about being one soul in the endless wood." A meditation by a singular writer who is less affected by nature than she is of it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
