This book] marks the arrival of a phenomenal writer creating an intellectual channel entirely their own, within which whales and feral goldfish swim by the enchantment, ache, and ecstasy of human life MEGHA MAJUMDAR, author of A Burning This} is a bright, shimmering gift of a book that deftly glides and weaves, exploring sea life and the self with boundless curiosity, tenderness, and wisdom... Every essay in this brilliant debut collection deserves to be treasured NICOLE CHUNG, author of All You Can Ever Know I really liked this book. It was funny, interesting, sad, and educational. It made me long for a world where people do not see your color, or who you are attracted to, and judge you off of it. It also made me feel bad for these creatures. As bad as we are to other humans, we are even worse to creatures we do not understand. Torturing jellyfish to make them rebirth, or using a special machine to literally shred thousands into little pieces. Ripping mothers away from their eggs, leaving all the eggs to die, because they want to study them. Polluting the rivers and causing one of the oldest existing fish to start dying out. The list goes on, why can't humans just let creatures live?

Conclusion: The proximate cause of death may be falling in love with the idea of a person, or the idea of a relationship." If You Flush a Goldfish: I had no idea how devastating goldfish were in the environment, which makes the fact that they are so common a little bit horrifying. I would have wanted to learn a little more about this. I understand that this is a childhood fascination, but given where the essay ended, with a story of mutually discovered transformation, I would have chosen a different water creature. Perhaps a coral, which utilize a variety of reproductive techniques and go through some cool physical transformations.This is a miraculous, transcendental book... To write with such grace, skill, and wisdom would be impressive enough; to have done so in their first major work is truly breathtaking. Sabrina Imbler is a generational talent, and this book is a gift to us all ED YONG, author of I Contain Multitudes

I think my expectations for this book of hybrid memoir / essays was a bit too high, so I ended up being disappointed. Although I enjoyed both aspects of Imbler's writing -- science journalism about interesting sea creatures and personal stories about their queer identity and experiences -- the essays felt like two alternating threads that weren't well integrated. A delicious balance of the zoological and the personal. Imbler manages to gaze both inward to the self and outward to the strange selves of the creatures in the world's waters ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN, author of Harmless Like You In How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, Sabrina Imbler examines a selection of marine life and their methods and adaptations of survival, highlighting what makes these creatures unique. Simultaneously, Imbler shares their experience as a queer, nonbinary POC working in science. Each anecdote is paired with a certain sea creature, their traits and habits becoming the jump-off point to an analogous revelation about Imbler themself.I love memoirs in which the author includes some kind of technical writing or specialized history, but especially when they include science writing. I learned about sea creatures, and connected emotionally with them, almost as much as I did with Imbler herself. This is a powerful, moving collection for the unexpected, heartbreaking, and affirming stories Imbler shared from the parts of the world we don't always pay attention to. Imbler pulls off an impressive feat: a book about the majestic, bewildering undersea world that also happens to be deeply human Vogue A beautiful lure that caught me; the lush colors of the cover, the temptation of sea creatures, explorations of identity. Overall, it was an interesting collection of pieces that interested and occasionally challenged me. I can be honest enough to say that Sy Montgomery and her attempts to do something similar drives me bonkers, perhaps because I've had my fill of straight, white, middle-class women. Intersectionality and grey areas are everything. Because whenever I meet a mixed person who looks something like me, I want to ask them The Question. I want to know what kind of Asian they are. I want to know how their parents met. I want to know what words they use to identify themselves. I want to know how close or distanced they feel to their own whiteness. I want to ask them the questions I don’t want strangers to ask me. In other words, I am also the asshat.” Each of the 10 essays in Imbler’s astonishing debut juxtaposes a strange lifeform from the deep with an episode from their own existence as a mixed-race, non-binary American. In How to Draw a Sperm Whale, their first romantic relationship is set alongside the accidental slaying of a whale – with each requiring its own protracted postmortem. In Pure Life, they describe the tenacious oddities that make each other’s existence possible via symbiosis in the scalding chemical soup around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. This is married with the story of Imbler’s arrival in a new city after leaving college, and their desperate search for a queer community “that warmed me until I tingled”. The descriptions of their fluctuating sense of gender and the joy of finding their queer family are lyrical and profound

Imbler blends personal history with the most fascinating writing on sea creatures living in remote and deep areas of the ocean. Metaphors abound around family, community, queerness, and survival; this book is another jewel in the crown of Imbler's incredible work Them There was one stunning paragraph where the author knows she is being hypocritical, but is talking only of her own half-Chinese ethnicity and complaining of it. I am complaining about the moment when the Asian woman's parentage is explained by one white person to another - Chinese mom and Jewish dad - like a caption, a specimen ID. A young queer science writer on some of the ocean's strangest creatures and what they can teach us about human empathy and survival

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The author is a journalist and writer who covers science and queer issues. They are both queer in terms of sexuality and gender as well as being mixed race. This brilliant collection of essays covers many of these elements of their identity by contrasting them with sea creatures that illustrate key elements.

I admit that I feel bad that I didn't like this as much as everyone else did. I really loved the first two essays. I loved all the essays, really. It's having them all in one book that was not really for me. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. Imbler's debut weaves the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family and coming of age, implicitly connecting endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and asking how they and we adapt, survive and care for each other. As someone who has had the luxury of taking their identity for granted, it was the exposing authenticity of Imbler’s personal journey that gripped me most. The descriptions of their fluctuating sense of gender, their desire to transform their body and the joy of finding their queer family were lyrical and profound.Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the mother octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the bizarre Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in the deep ocean, far below where the light reaches. Imbler's debut weaves the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family and coming of age, implicitly connecting endangered sea life to marginalised human communities and asking how they and we adapt, survive and care for each other.