The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog
Carly Anne York
Narrator: Eileen Stevens
Hachette Audio / Basic Books


Like the web content producer of the same name, I f**kin love science, and Carly Anne York’s book injected it right into my veins. The title is captivating, and so is the rest of the book – informative yet accessible and engaging at the same time. Full of little science trivia, including how quirky experiments lead to applications that affect our daily lives. Somehow, I ended up with both the digital and audio galleys, and I loved them both!

I received an audio ARC from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an enjoyable love letter to curiosity and the value of science for science's sake. It has some fun stories about the unlikely benefits of "silly science", and I appreciated that it started with an author's note acknowledging the history of animal testing and challenging it as an ongoing practice.

The colloquial tone made this very accessible, but it didn't always work for me. Sometimes I felt like it tipped over into cutesy or condescending (and anthropomorphising animals as "guys" and "ladies" gets very dark very quickly when we're talking about duck mating). The way the author talks about challenging the idea of science as wasteful expenditure through effective science communication also felt a little naive in the current political climate. Communicating science to the general public is essential, but scrambling to defend science from bad faith political attacks because "it might be useful one day" just feels like letting those politicians set the terms of the debate.

I was also disappointed to have some talking points about "obesity" thrown in. It was a brief reference to something widely culturally accepted to be true, so I don't think it necessarily reflects the quality of the rest of the research, but it didn't inspire confidence in me.

The audiobook production was good, and I thought the narrator was excellent. She felt like a very good choice for a lighthearted pop science book like this, because her voice conveys curiosity and enthusiasm really well.