Thank you to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian and Spiegel & Grau for the advanced reading copy of this gorgeous book in exchange for an honest review.

I cannot put into words how much I loved this entire book, so much so, that I ended up reading it twice. There was so much information that piqued every curiosity in my brain, I needed to dissect it twice to make sure I fully grasped everything. The book is somewhat akin to what would happen if you made Braiding Sweetness more queer and more anecdotal.

Every chapter follows a different bio-factoid but gives a personal touch to each, which could feel a little quiet and bare. But the writing gives such a full and beautiful touch. You receive so much environmental education, and you don't even notice.

As a queer environmentalist, every story felt personal, heartful, and poignant. I have already recommended it to all of my friends, and will continue to recommend it to anyone I meet.

“As I leave my spot for the very last time, I am full of sadness, excitement, fear, and gratitude. I am full of all that has ever lived and died inside me.” 🤍

a special thank you to Net Galley and Spiegel & Grau for allowing me access to an Advanced Reader’s Copy of Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian!! it’s an absolute privilege to receive an ARC & i’m so honored to be able to share a honest review in exchange.

🍄‍🟫 publication date: may 27th, 2025
review: ★ ★ ★ ★.7 (06/30/25)
a curious, childhood reminiscent feeling of wonder enveloped me with each chapter that followed.

i loved how Kaishian explored her identity & beliefs through various creatures. specifically, fungi representing ideas outside of the binary was a clever way to illustrate how one’s prejudice against queerness can transfer into nature.

i also appreciated reading about the historical exclusions of marginalized voices in academia. although the biological, scientific & historical details felt dense at times, it was still understandable.

it was exciting to come across corvidae, the bird family that sparked my interest for ornithology. while it’s not part of the university path i’m on, i can’t help but continue to carry my love for the field.

this book is far more philosophical than i expected. in addition to lessons like creating a life built of choices honoring yourself, Kaishian discussed various abstract topics in witty ways that truly open your eyes AND mind.

“What questions might we be inspired to ask if we can shed the confines of “normal”?

This book was such an unexpected treat and I enjoyed reading it so much. As someone who is also eternally fascinated by the differences in nature and learning about how we interact with nature, this book was very compelling for me. I learned so much from this book, much of it about humans and not just other organisms.

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum. She is an expert in her field and also works in spaces queer ecology and queer theory. She brought all of these practices and expertise to Forest Euphoria. It was truly fascinating to gain knowledge from her throughout this book. She brings many sociopolitical concepts to what we know and don’t know or recognize about nature.
“What questions might we be inspired to ask if we can shed the confines of “normal”?

This book was such an unexpected treat and I enjoyed reading it so much. As someone who is also eternally fascinated by the differences in nature and learning how we interact with nature, this book was very compelling for me. I learned so much from this book, much of it about humans and not just other organisms.

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum. She is an expert in her field and also works in spaces of queer ecology and queer theory. She brought all of these practices and expertise to Forest Euphoria. It was truly fascinating to gain knowledge from her throughout this book. She brings many sociopolitical concepts to what we know and don’t know or recognize about nature.

I found myself highlighting so many things throughout reading Forest Euphoria and I could go into all the different things I learned from this book here, but my review would be far too long! I loved each fact and concept that I will be taking away from this book, but mostly I loved how this book made me feel. Throughout this book while reading about the author's feelings and some of her experiences I had such a feeling of weird nostalgia. I was also the kid going outside and getting lost in the experience of staring at one spot all day, watching insects go about their lives or being still and waiting for the amphibians to come out. Growing up and learning about the ways that nature interacts with and has an impact on us has been a huge part of my life.

Forest Euphoria was a valuable read to me in that it presented new concepts to me or more in depth information on concepts I was familiar with. The practices and knowledge in this book are so important for us right now. It is important for us to recognize the diversity in nature and the intersectionality of the many ways that we as humans interpret diversity and differences in order for us to grow.

This quote from Forest Euphoria really hit me. When discussing cicadas and the 2024 broods of cicadas reemerging, Kaishian says:

“I hope that in 2245, when these two broods synchronously erupt again, they will be proud of us.”

Yeah, me too.

I did not finish this book. It wasn't a bad book but not what I wanted to read. It was more of a memoir than a science book. It is well written and the author's experiences were interesting but not enough for me to continue. This book is for people who like to read memoirs.

This book is so unique in the way that it intertwines a sort of memoir along with stories of nature and its queerness. It was so interesting to find out all of this new to me facts on nature. There are flowers that move through genders during their lifetimes, there are parts where it talks about overlooked elements to in nature such as fungi and insects. Interesting, and affirming that nature in itself is queer.

I was already part way through this book when I realised that it's not just about mushrooms but actually about a wide range of animals, insects, and other wonderful things.
It was fascinating to see how Ononiwu Kaishian wove her memoir and personal identity through her life's work (and joy!). Always a lovely feeling to see someone find their passion and to share in that thrill with them!

Forest Euphoria is the most lyrically written non-fiction I have ever read. The writing is beautiful, blending scientific language and concepts seamlessly with descriptive passages. It has the perfect balance of the author’s personal anecdotes and experiences with multicultural and intersectional knowledge. I adore the focus on community this book has. Not only is it informative and entertaining, it feels accessible and welcoming due to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s overflowing enthusiasm for nature and sharing understanding about it all.

Forest Euphoria is a fascinating book full of surprises! I appreciated the mash-up of scientific writing and memoir, making the contents easily digestible. Kaishian has written an enlightening book that invites us to live with curiosity and love. I highly recommend this gem!

“Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US on May 27, 2025 by Spiegel and Grau.

Forest Euphoria is a revelatory journey through the wild, slippery, and spectacular queerness of the natural world—an urgent, lyrical exploration that shatters the binaries we’ve inherited about gender, species, and even what it means to be “human.” Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian blends memoir and science with a tender precision, inviting us to see nature as not separate from ourselves but deeply entangled with all of its “undesirable” and uncategorizable beings: fungi with thousands of sexes, intersex slugs, glass eels whose genders remain mysteries until their final year. Here, queerness isn’t just identity—it’s ecology, time, and relationality writ large.

Kaishian’s reflections on kinship with snakes, swamps, and fungi pulse alongside sharp critiques of colonialism’s ongoing assault on both biodiversity and marginalized bodies. She draws on Indigenous frameworks like kincentric ecology and refuses the human exceptionalism that science often upholds, reminding us that we evolved alongside microbes, fungi, and animals, bound in a community where time itself is a shared rhythm. The draining of wetlands, the enforcement of rigid taxonomy, and the violent erasures wrought by capitalism all thread through her argument, showing how control over nature mirrors control over bodies and identities.

What resonates most is how Forest Euphoria makes room for the ambiguous, the in-between, and the unclassifiable—not just in nature, but in ourselves. It’s a fierce, tender call to embrace complexity, to reject productivity as the sole measure of worth, and to reimagine our relationships with all beings as collaborative and compassionate. This book is a balm for anyone who’s ever felt out of place or boxed in, offering instead a vision of life that is webby, fluid, and unapologetically queer.

For lovers of intersectional ecology, queer theory, and radical care, Forest Euphoria will shift the way you see the living world—and your place within it. It’s a wild, necessary read for our times.

📖 Read this if you love: queer ecology, radical nature writing, and intersectional explorations of identity and belonging; the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer or Sunaura Taylor. Specifically recommended for my friends Dak and Julia.

🔑 Key Themes: Queerness and Fluidity in Nature, Kincentric Ecology and Interdependence, Colonialism and Ecological Violence, Ecological Justice and Collective Care.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Abuse (minor), Child Abuse (minor), Enslavement (minor), Drug Use (minor), Alcoholism (minor), Toxic Relationship (minor), Mental Illness (minor), War (minor), Genocide (minor), Pandemic (minor).

Forest Euphoria hit a special cord with me, someone who also grew up with that feeling of "otherness", who found comfort in nature and all of the life there. This book has a lot of heart and I really enjoyed getting to see the author find themselves in the science field but I did struggle with the lack of structure in the book. Without many chapter separations it was difficult to follow where the author was taking us and how thoughts were connected. I would sometimes realize I didn't understand what was being said or why because it didn't really connect with the previous "story" and try to go back without that helping answer my questions.

I really wanted to enjoy this book, as someone who deeply resonates with being queer, neurodivergent and finding a home in the natural sciences, but the lack of structure really took me out of it and made this short book hard to work through.

FINALLY, someone said it: mushrooms are gay. This book combining nature/science writing and queer theory is... extremely my shit. I am THE target audience. And it delivered! From the queer community of fungi to the deeply misunderstood slug to the gender variance of eels, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian explores the parallels between LGBTQ+ identities and some of the plants and animals that reflect them. For any queer readers who like to forage or birdwatch, BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW, you'll thank me later.

This is my favourite kind of non-fiction - part memoir, part deep dive into the natural world, with a hefty sprinkling of queerness. I find the world of fungi absolutely fascinating and it was inspiring to see Kaishian's fungal journey! I'm inspired to find my own "sit spot" now.

"And I hope that in sharing these stories, you too will feel the closeness of the earth, the lack of space between our cells, and the memory of each other".

I loved everything about this book. Euphoria is the right term; you can feel Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's enthusiasm for nature at every page. She starts with her childhood, observing snakes and insects, her time studying biology, including under the mentorship of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a summer spent in China studying Chinese medicine... There's a lot about queerness and her own identity and reflections about her own gender (she seems to be using she/her/hers; I apologise if this is incorrect), about fitting in and wanting to be invisible. There are some really dark passages about trauma and SA. But overall what shines is how much she loves nature - not "just" the fluffy stuff, you feel her love and empathy for every living creature, even the more humble or the less photogenic. That book was well-written and poetic but not cheesy,.and I highlighted so many passages...
I'll be keeping an eye on what she publishes next and I'll certainly be reading it.

The way the author writes about nature and the innate queerness is marvelous and beautiful. As soon as I started listening to this one I knew it would be something I loved.

This book uses queer examples from nature including mushrooms, eels, ravens and crows, swamps, snakes, cicadas, grasslands and frogs to illustrate how the world isn’t a binary world but one with plenty of spaces between to be explored and appreciated. I loved the general discussion and its connection to her own life and I am honestly obsessed with her work now. If you have any interest in nature or the queerness of it all, I HIGHLY recommend this one as soon as you can get your hands on it!!!!

Thank you to NetGalley for this e-ARC.

A book that spoke to my wild, queer heart.

Kaishian's writing is candid, open about what it is to be labeled as "other," when nature itself is filled with acceptance. In the beginning, Kaishian writes of a classmate whose father regularly hunted down the snakes on their family's property; they were proud to protect their home from such creatures. When reading this passage, I was brutally reminded how queer people are labeled as dangerous and are systemically harmed in order to maintain "peace."

Like Kaishian, my childhood was spent in the wilderness. I remember tadpole-hunting, fishing, bird-watching, and fossil-finding. I would wade through the murkiness of a pond or the swiftness of a creek just to snatch a tadpole, a minnow if I was lucky. Those activities were when I was most at peace. My "strangeness" just wasn't welcome amongst my peers. So, I was often alone in this enjoyment. Reading this novel helped me realize that I was not the only one who appreciated nature's plethora of diversity.

Forest Euphoria is a breathtaking memoir that weaves together science, personal reflection and deep reverence for the natural world. Dr Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s ability to draw powerful parallels between human experience and the life of the forest is nothing short of extraordinary. Her reflections as a queer woman with ADHD enrich the narrative, offering rare and vulnerable insights that ground the book in authenticity. This memoir reads like a love letter to nature and a profound meditation on identity, resilience and interconnectedness.

Absolutely stunning prose, lyrical without losing clarity, and deeply evocative without ever feeling overwrought. I'm mesmerised by Patty's ability to bring fungi, forests and ecosystems to life while simultaneously sharing her own life story. This is a book that I’ll definitely be gifting to friends.

A powerful reminder of how deeply human lives are entangled with the wild beauty of the world around us.

I don't often read memoir and I was expecting a slightly different focus, but (among the many things this book is) the deep dive into the sex lives of the small and slimy was captivating, and many aspects of the author's story were relatable and moving. It's a story made of patched together essays that flow rapidly from theme to concept and rapidly back around to take on more layers. Although my own interest wasn't piqued enough to finish, it's because this kind of deep dive into most anyone's life isn't a compelling prospect for me. Let everyone else's reviews speak louder than mine.

A tender, heartfelt exploration of queerness in nature mixed with personal reflection. This is my favorite type of non-fiction - scientific fact mixed with the author's history, reflections, musings, revelations, etc. Eels, crows, slugs, fungi, this covered a wide range throughout nature, showing similarities to us as humans in terms of sex and gender. This was beautiful and harsh, much like nature itself.

I'd recommend this for fans of How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler, or Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy.

Throughout her childhood, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian developed an affinity for her natural surroundings, particularly for snakes, slugs, and bugs. Their experience as lesser-understood creatures of the animal kingdom, tucked away in ground cover and the night, mirrored Kaishian’s own. “Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature” (Spiegel & Grau, 2025) integrates Kaishain’s narrative, queer theory, and development as a mycologist to proffer delicious and curious details about nature surrounding us.

Dr. Kaishian, curator of mycology at the New York State Museum, presents numerous extraordinary queer ecological findings, including the sexual morphology of cassowary birds, the treatment of swamps as a litmus test for societal health, and the expanse of mutually beneficial relationships that fungi enter into with plants. As a neurodivergent and queer educator, Kaishian emphasizes that teaching about the regularity of queerness in nature is ethical, objective, and better science—especially when we acknowledge cultural bias that limits the information in nature we are willing (or unwilling) to share.

Readers of Margaret Renkl, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, Anna L. Tsing, Wendell Berry, and James Crews might enjoy Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s “Forest Euphoria.”

Thank you to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Spiegel & Grau, and NetGalley for the eARC!

*Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the e-ARC! All opinions are my own.*

I feel a little conflicted with this one, honestly. In my nonfiction reads, it's important for me personally to learn something or otherwise come away with something. While I was happy to read Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's story, I'm not so sure I "got" anything from this book. There are facts here, definitely, but they are thrown at you in a way that I found to be pretty overwhelming as your average layperson. It feels a bit infodump-y and I didn't love how I was being given this information.

Also. I'm not MAD this is a memoir. HOWEVER. Idk if this is a new thing publishers are doing now or if it's just something I'm noticing more frequently, but this book is definitely a memoir. It is not marketed as such. This is marketed as a book of essays about the queerness of nature. And now I know more about Dr. Ononiwu Kaishian than I do about any mushrooms. Which isn't AT ALLLLL what I thought I was going to get. Memoirs are HUGE market!!! They will sell, guys! You don't have to hide them in stuff secretly! Just say what you mean on the tin, P L E A S E.

I also want to specifically call out: there is a huge trigger warning in the first chapter of this book (the title is about snails, I have since forgotten it) for <spoiler>childhood sexual abuse</spoiler> that is not mentioned at ANY point before it shows up. It just happens, no warning. So just also know that, I guess.

Anyway, to conclude, this wasn't much for me but I can see where a good amount of people will like this for sure, hence the rating that is otherwise higher than I would typically make it.