Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl: Essays

This mesmerizing collection from novelist and essayist Wong (The Box) uses observations of small invertebrates to tackle questions about selfhood, consciousness, and humans’ relationship with nature. In the title essay, Wong turns the life of a sea snail into a bildungsroman, chronicling its journey from a tiny larva to its eventual formation of a protective shell, which prompts questions about the snail’s mode of being (“She undulates at the threshold between what we call living and inanimate”). In “The One and the Many,” Wong juxtaposes her experience providing a home to a small snail she found attached to a stack of mail with the story of an endangered Bermudian land snail that became part of a captive breeding program. When the snail doesn’t leave the open takeaway container she uses to house it, she begins to wonder if her love for the creature is oppressive (“What if it didn’t feel like love but like surveillance?”). Love comes into focus again in “How to Love a Jellyfish,” in which the author questions what it would look like to marvel at another creature without capturing and using it for one’s own needs. Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved. (Feb.)