Seventeen ingenious essays devoted to snails’ and aquatic invertebrates’ uncanny ways of living
“[Mandy-Suzanne Wong] has made sea snails totally present on the page, magically uncurling their opaque inner worlds, making them resonant subjects of marvel and love. . . . Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is up there with some of my favorite animal writing of the past decade.”
—Ania Szremski, 4Columns
“[Wong’s] gentle coexistence with other life-forms stands in stark contrast to humanity’s predilection for exploitation. . . . A passionate paean to life’s wonders.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Mesmerizing. . . . Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wong’s investigations undulate, beckoning an embrace of the unknowable, and with it a call to better coexistence.”
—Orion
“I recommend these essays to anyone who enjoys contemplating how much we still have to learn about invertebrate lives. How might we thread the needle between devising open-ended questions to learn more and filling in the blanks with images generated by a poetical human brain?” —Barbara J. King, Science
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. Personal yet de-personal, at once tender and challenging, Wong’s essays invite humans to rethink our relationship to other beings. Instead of capturing and destroying them, using them as resources or reflections of ourselves, she asks us only to coexist with them—to cherish them although, and because, we cannot fully know them.