I had the pleasure of early review of this book. A gift of self reflection and accountability. How do you view the world around you and your relation to it? Can you open yourself up to a new perspective, that does not make you the main character?

No universal answers offered here. No right or wrong. Personal exploration of honesty and humanity of self can support “your” answers.

Her thought provoking prompts open you up to CURIOSITY, Lean In…

Thank you NetGalley and Vanessa!!

This book threw me into a depressive episode. That's an overexaggeration of course, but it is designed to encourage you to see the world as it really is and to confront the discomforts of the unsustainability of our current society and all of our personal roles and layers within it, with few words of comfort to soften the blow. The book warns you of this from the beginning, then follows with ideas, mental exercises, and discussion questions about what it means to "outgrow" our current modern life, which is rooted in violence, injustice, and unsustainable harm of the land and its elements. I think this book would be most useful to process in a group setting; doing the deep work this book invites alone would be a daunting and perhaps grim task. The book is also upfront that it will not give easy answers and that it will do more work in showing the complexities, the interconnected pieces, the many layers, than to try to offer pat solutions, and it warns readers away from romanticizing a "pure" life in nature as the answer. This is refreshing in some ways, and discouraging/frustrating in other ways. I had a particularly strong reaction to the author's anthropomorphism of AI. The author sees AI as an entity and a tool that can help us think about society, climate change, and social responsibility in different ways, and dismisses critics of AI as being too limited in their vision for what it can be used for. Perhaps that's true. Or perhaps, as studies are starting to show, AI is very good at telling us what we want to hear and mirroring back human ideas without context. It seemed like a jarring method for a book about the unsustainability of modern life. I don't think I can encapsulate my many emotions about this book in a simple five-star rating. I am excited this book exists, I am daunted by this book, and I am frustrated by this book. I think the fact that it elicits such strong emotions means it opened up deeper thinking and engagement the way it set out to do.