The work as a whole finds Shapland determined to reckon with the biggest challenges that face us as a society ... Shapland’s use of the queer experience is deeply empowering.
Although her descriptions of rampant toxicity and environmental degradation raise alarms, she is not primarily concerned with drawing attention to threat ... The essays themselves...refuse neat containment ... Several of Shapland’s personal narratives are explicitly framed as metaphor ... Thrumming at the heart of each essay is Shapland’s desire to develop a life for herself as a writer, to build an identity and a mode of existence that will allow her to follow her creative pursuits ... Her collection offers us insightful reflection on the weaponization of vulnerability and the fantasy of isolation at the heart of many apocalyptic visions. But it also offers us a portrait of an author coming to an awareness of writing itself as 'a mode of perception, a sensitivity to the world.'
Intimate and well-researched ... t times her personal reflections feel overly constrained by a set of left-of-liberal, white anxieties, which Shapland attempts to interrogate yet cannot seem to move beyond ... Shapland is most convincing when she grasps hold of some tentative yet essential hope.
A masterful, incisive, and intellectually moving piece of work that I couldn’t stop reading and annotating. When I finished it, I wanted to immediately reread it and make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Jenn Shapland moves between numerous weighty topics ... Shapland challenges readers to broaden their perspective and perhaps even join her in being thin-skinned.
Exhilarating ... It’s hard not to marvel at how the author draws unexpected conclusions from a diverse array of anecdotes, illuminating the profound ways in which individuals and the world shape each other.
