3.5 stars. This memoir had me thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer's work even before the author started name-dropping. It's a fine suggestion for readers who liked RWK, although the writing was a little too much for me-- a little over-the-top, a little performative, a little trying-too-hard. The topics meander around a bit, more a book that would be described as a "meditation" on a variety of topics. A good choice for a slower reading, low-demand reading experience.

I listened to this on eAudio. I don't understand why publishers choose narrators who have minor speech impairment-- it seems like a lot of audios I've listened to the last couple of years feature these types of narrators. Whenever I think of this while listening, I wonder if this is an ableist thought, but I think it's more a curiosity-- I don't work with anyone or interact regularly with anyone who has a speech impairment, so it seems like this group is somehow overrepresented among audiobook narrators. Since it affects my listening experience and is disruptive for me, I think it's a fair question.

eAudioARC from NetGalley.

It's been over a week and I'm still thinking about this book. I tell all my friends about it, because it is utterly fascinating. I love watching nature documentaries, but they hardly, if ever, go into anything deeper than the mating habits of bower birds. But this book makes the connection that bower birds (and perhaps other animals that don't have so obvious a way to tell) DO have preferences for their sexual partners, and perhaps DO have some agency over who they procreate with instead of relying solely on base need. That is just so fascinating to me. I describe this book to my friends thus: it is the intersection of colonialism, queerness, and nature. If that sounds like something you're interested in, READ THIS BOOK!

One part memoir, one part science lesson, one part queer theory, and all parts very good, Forest Euphoria is one mycologist's experience with all the weird parts of nature and how they helped her come to love herself too. Kaishian grew up in the woods and swamps, drawn to the things that other people didn't want to be near: mushrooms, slugs, crows, insects. She also grew up feeling like she was different from most of the people around her, maybe sharing more in common with her beloved fungi than people. As she learned more, she also learned that nature is a lot queerer than most of us know: fungi with dozens of sexes, intersex slugs, crows in same-sex relationships. This book describes her journey and teaches you really cool science stuff. Ten out of ten.

This was just okay for me. Unfortunately, I think I'm just not the reader for this book. I got bogged down in the details and tangents and just didn't enjoy the book overall.

I was really disappointed that the title archived before I had a chance to get much into the book. I did like what I listened to, but it wasn't enough to give an honest review.

[Thanks to the publishers for a free audiobook via NetGalley!] Roses to the author. Roses to the narrator. Roses to the publisher. I LOVE THIS BOOK. Beautiful, tender, hopeful, premonitory. It is so reassuring to read such a beautifully rendered description of Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's kinship with the 'undesirable' facets of nature - a kinship I feel myself, but have always struggled to put into words. I usually don't get on with audiobooks, especially memoir, that's not narrated by the author, but Aven Shore does a stellar job at relaying these anecdotes and essays with earnest emotion. I will be buying a copy the moment the paperback drops to annotate and keep forever. Can't recommend enough.

I was immediately obsessed with this book. The author’s thought process is refreshing and needed, wise in a very fungal-way, I hope Kaishian would like that statement. I felt a kinship with the stories of Kaishian’s childhood, finding comfort in nature. Their obsession with mycology is something I deeply honor and respect. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, so I too tend to find myself feeling more connected to things like trees and water than to people. I wasn’t even 4 chapters in before I went online, found their website, and subscribed to hopefully get more updates on their works and writings. I’ve never done that before, really, so I think that says something. I would love to read more books by them if they were to publish again. I also was absolutely in love with the audiobook narrator, I’ve never liked a narrator so much that I actively plan to remember and search for other works, but Aven Shore is a name I’m going to remember.

Overall, I enjoyed this. It’s part memoir, part nature writing. But 100% an exploration of how the author made peace with being queer through the medium of nature and biology. Nature, afterall, does delight in myriad forms and some very strange doings. The writing was lovely, occasionally edging on self indulgent. However, the point was to share how the author found her sense of peace via nature rather than to deliver a lot of scientific knowledge.

Forest Euphoria is an interesting book in the vein of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It’s a mix of autobiography, scientific information, and social commentary. The author, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, is a fascinating person. Her father is Armenian and her mother is Irish, and she grew up near swamps in the Hudson Valley. She is also a mycologist, which is an extremely rare scientific profession that studies fungi among other things. Finally, she identifies as both queer and neurodivergent.

One of the parts I appreciated most about Forest Euphoria was learning the many ways fungi, plants, and animals do not fit into modern western, human, sex categories. Conservatives have often argued that being heterosexual and cisgender is the only natural state of being. Kaishian brings up numerous examples from nature to disprove that claim. Kaishian also points out that western scientists (who are supposedly completely objective) have long ignored instances in nature that contradict their beliefs about what is normal or right for people. Western scientists have only just begun to correct for their past biases.

There were a couple of aspects of this book that brought it down to 3 stars for me. Firstly, it lacks a strong or consistent enough theme to unify its various parts. The subtitle of the book is “The Abounding Queerness of Nature”, and while there were some such examples, Kaishian should have included a lot more.

There were just too many random topics that were covered in this book. The biggest offender (for me) was a rather lengthy discussion of the Golden Records sent with the Voyager spacecrafts. It was interesting, but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with the abounding queerness of nature.

Another of my other issues is that Kaishian strongly stated that most mushrooms are perfectly safe to eat and aren’t poisonous. I would assume she is correct about that. But my problem is after establishing the point that mushrooms have been falsely maligned as dangerous, she then writes about her great experiences of using hallucinogenic mushrooms in college. I have heard about studies that demonstrate the usefulness of hallucinogenic mushrooms under proper medical supervision. However, Kaishian didn’t have proper medical supervision, and she didn’t provide a warning that taking hallucinogenic mushrooms without proper medical supervision might be dangerous.

Overall, though, I found the book to be both informative and enjoyable even with my qualms.

Thanks to Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks through NetGalley who allowed me to listen to the audio version of this book. The narrator, Aven Shore, did an excellent job!

Part memoir, part reflective science text, Forest Euphoria is a love letter to the natural world that will make readers want to go outside to rediscover the wondrous queerness of the world.

Beautifully written and incredibly narrated, part nature guide and part memoir, this book is a beautiful combining of our earth and all the things that live upon it and our search for ourselves. This was a really beautiful book to read going into pride month.

Forest Euphoria offers a thoughtful and underutilized approach to understanding the natural world through the lens of queer theory. Rather than centering queerness solely as a form of identity, the book draws on queer theory's broader critical lens (its questioning of binaries, categorizations, and norms) to reconsider how we think about species, sex, behavior, and biology. Slugs, eels, fungi, and other organisms become entry points into a conversation about the instability of categories we often treat as fixed and how the natural world more often defies than conforms to these rigid boundaries.

Early in the book, I was reminded of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, a show I first encountered in an undergraduate “Biology of Sex” class that used humor and spectacle to highlight the diversity of sexual behavior in animals. However, I was glad to see that Forest Euphoria goes beyond simply presenting examples of “non-traditional” sexual morphology and behavior in the natural world. It offers deeper reflections on what these examples reveal about our broader understanding of nature and about ourselves. The author expands on these conversations and use queerness not only as a way to challenge normative ideas of sex and gender but as a critical tool for examining how scientific knowledge is produced; inviting readers to consider which kind of research receives funding, whose questions shape the field, what counts as legitimate data, and how systems of power, identity, and social norms influence the scientific process from within.

While Forest Euphoria succeeds in opening up critical conversations about how queerness can, and should, reshape our understanding of science and the natural world, it is ultimately a memoir that weaves the author’s personal experiences and identity as a queer person into the larger analytical framework. This personal lens is powerful in places, particularly when it brings emotional depth and vulnerability to topics that are often treated as detached or objective. But as the book progresses, the memoir component increasingly becomes the dominant mode, with the scientific and ecological material pushed into the background.

As this shift happens, the book introduces broader social issues such as colonization, capitalism, and genocide. These are undeniably important topics, and clearly significant to the author’s personal experience and interests. However, I found that as the book moved in this direction, it drifted somewhat from its central premise. Rather than integrating these themes into a cohesive dialogue connected to queerness and queer theory, the book tends to present them as separate reflections, with the links between them often left implicit or underdeveloped. This lack of connection results in a narrative that feels fragmented, with compelling ideas existing alongside one another but not fully engaging or illuminating each other. Still, these conversations are overshadowed by the memoir aspects, which I personally found difficult to connect with.

Stylistically, I found the book could have benefited from more structural elements (more chapters or subheadings) to break up the text and clearly delineate its different themes. As an educator, this would have made it easier for me to incorporate some of the non-memoir aspects into a classroom setting. Without these clear demarcations, however, it becomes difficult to separate the personal narrative from the broader discussions (which I think is likely what the author wanted), but complicates their use in an educational context. These structural elements may be present in the print version, but they were not apparent in the audiobook I listened to. Additionally, I think the audiobook would have benefited from a different narrator.

That said, a few sections of this book really stood out to me. For example, the discussion of indigeneity and how living, breathing, and dying within specific ecologies leaves “an imprint on behaviors, beliefs, and ways of thinking of that human collective” was particularly compelling as were the considerations regarding how language itself is shaped by the environments and cultures from which it emerges, highlighting the deep connections between place, identity, and our understanding of the world. I also appreciated the critique of ‘ecosystem services’ and the common equation of productivity with value, which raises important questions in environmental and social sciences.

Ultimately, this book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that illuminates important conversations and complex intersections of culture, science, nature, and knowledge production, challenging how we understand norms and structures. However, with the memoir elements becoming the dominant focus, the work feels more like a personal narrative framed by, rather than fully woven into, its original thematic aims.

TW: Child sexual abuse
The author’s mentions of their experience of childhood sexual abuse were presented without much warning or contextual framing. While these disclosures are no doubt significant to the author’s story, they emerge abruptly and may be distressing to readers who were not expecting to encounter such material in a book largely positioned as an exploration of the natural world. Additionally, I am concerned that the way this experience is presented could unintentionally reinforce harmful misconceptions, such as the idea that trauma shapes or alters sexual identity, an argument often used by conservative groups to at best delegitimize and at worst weaponize queer identities.

3.25 stars.

Thank you, NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks, for sending this audiobook for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

I got this as an audio arc on Netgalley and it has since come out. Both the writing and narrating got me hooked. Was more memoir than expected but interweaving personal stories with nature to show that we as humans are nature too and that it means in its core therefore that nature is queer is stunningly well done.

i loved every second of this. completely exquisite and i only wish i had it when writing my dissertation at uni. the reading was gorgeous - it kept me company during a 6 hour wait in a&e. i feel very lucky to have read this.

This book was much more of a memoir than I expected. I did really enjoy the fascinating information about mycology. As someone who tends towards eco-anxiety sometimes the book was hard to take. I try not to get overwhelmed by the terrible things we as a species have done to the planet and this book does confront that a little. There are also descriptions of how destruction of land had been used in conflicts so sometimes the history gets very heavy as well. Obviously this is valuable and important information (I had never heard of the destruction of the Mulberry trees before) and shows how we are all on this planet together. The interconnectedness of everything is beautiful and terrifying. I mention all of this because I felt like the description leaned into the science part more than the memoir part and this book is very much both. Aven Shore was a good narrator and kept a nice pace with all the information. Thank you NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a very mellow read and overall I quite enjoyed it. I appreciated the theme of the queerness of nature, the anti-colonial lens and the link to actual science and biology. While there was a good balance of memoir and science, toward the end I found the pacing was off, making it more difficult for me to connect with the writing and the author. The audio narration was well done.

I recommend this to folks who are interested in reading about nature and biology through the lens of politics, philosophy and the personal.

I was expecting a nonfiction novel while instead Forest Euphoria is a true memoir with some science, animal facts, and queerness thrown in. I preferred the elements of this book that spoke about the queerness of nature- especially the fact that scientific research is formulated in a way that promotes binary beliefs (ie: queer scientific observations are not included in studies due to political and societal pressures). I did not enjoy the memoir aspect of this book. 3.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to the audiobook Forest Euphoria.

Forest Euphoria talks about the often buried avenues of scientific and historical research into queer topics. I like that the author discusses how often scientists don't include queer scientific observations in their studies and how little queer history is discussed. I like that this book talks about these often overlooked topics. The author's personal tale is woven throughout the narrative of facts and studies and it makes the book very fascinating to listen to. This book felt like a combination between a memoir and a niche nonfiction book. Forest Euphoria is a fantastic book for people who love to talk about the science and history behind queerness.

The audiobook is very well produced and sounds great. The narrator sounds interested and is engaging with the story. The narrator also still sounds great sped up and was overall very easy to understand!

This is a great book for people who want to try a nonfiction book without it being like a textbook. I also think it's a great addition to the queer nature and history book canon. I would recommend this book for an intriguing summer read!

When reading this summary, I missed how heavy the memoir portion was going to be and thought it would mostly be just what the title explained. I ended up being fine with it, but just thought I would mention in case others go into the book confused, who might not be in it for the memoir part.

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian explains how her childhood, family, teachers, and nature experiences have shaped who she has become, what she has chosen to study, and how she interacts with her environment. Although she is a mycologist, this book discusses much more than fungi. She discusses creatures that will change their sex when it is needed for reproduction, creatures that have multiple kinds of genitalia in one body, and creatures that are so secretive we have yet to learn how their reproductive cycles work. Scientific studies are used as evidence for various facts and Kaishian also explains how many studies have been silenced or lacked support from the scientific community when those studies had topics that were seen as queer. She shares the various ways that spending time in nature or studying different species has helped her to better understand herself and her needs. Kaishian is so open about her various revelations and confusions as she grows as a human, student, and educator.

Listening to the audiobook, narrated by Aven Shore, allowed me to feel the passion and excitement for nature that the author was trying to express. Some moments seemed to jump from one topic to the next without a transition that might not have been as jarring if I had a visual book to reference while I was listening. But this also helped the book to feel more conversational.

We need more books that confirm the abounding queerness of nature so more people understand the truth about the truly fascinating world around us. This book also reminded me to take more time to just sit and take in my environment.

I love seeing people having great experiences after coming out of the ESF program from Syracuse University! I have met and read about so many wonderful people from this Environmental Science Program.

Eels are magnetic! (Sort of.)

I definitely learned some new fun facts that I cannot wait to share at unsuspecting people! I love random fun facts. Some fun facts: snails are kinda sorta basically genderfluid. And some lady birds have fake male reproductive parts. Isn't that fun? I'll say it again: love fun facts.

This is a non-fiction book about the unique and interesting aspects of sexuality within nature and animals and some plant-adjacent beings (fungi and the like). And this is interspersed with lots of personal anecdotes.

I do understand why the personal anecdotes were included, but most felt rather unnecessary, leading the author and book off on unrelated tangents that struggled to get back to the main point at hand.

Overall, this was a cool book, especially if you like bizarre facts and nature! And it also has a pretty cover!

Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review! My Goodreads review is up and my TikTok (Zoe_Lipman) review will be up at the end of the month with my monthly reading wrap-up.