Narrator: Imagine being eight years old, your mind still buzzing from a family trip to India where you saw the magnificent, shimmering dance of a peacock. Back in your third-grade classroom in suburban Phoenix, your teacher announces an animal-drawing contest. You know exactly what you’ll draw. But when you ask to begin, the teacher insists everyone must first go to the library. There are no books on peacocks. When the teacher sees you’ve written “Peacocks are the national bird of India” in your notebook, she taps it with her finger. Later, she announces to the class that some students have “misunderstood the assignment” and must draw “American animals,” looking directly at you. The shame is hot and total. You are forced to draw a bald eagle, coloring it with the “saddest sepia crayon,” learning a painful lesson: to ignore a part of yourself, to make your heritage invisible.

This feeling of being an outsider, and the search for belonging, is a central thread in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s lyrical collection of essays, World of Wonders. The book reveals how the marvels of the natural world—from the humble firefly to the bizarre axolotl—can offer us profound lessons on identity, resilience, and how to find our place on this astonishing planet.

Narrator: Throughout her life, Nezhukumatathil navigates the feeling of being an outsider, a person of color in predominantly white spaces. She finds that the animal kingdom offers powerful metaphors for coping with prejudice and asserting one's identity.

This begins in childhood. After the humiliating peacock incident, her family moves to rural Kansas, where they live on the grounds of a mental institution where her mother works. To cope with the stares and the stigma, she imagines herself as a narwhal, the "unicorn of the sea." The narwhal’s tusk becomes a symbolic saber, a way to fend off the ignorance of classmates. When a boy on the bus pulls at the corners of his eyes to mock her Filipino mother, she feels an icy shame and wants to "dive deep" like the narwhal, using its ability to "see through sound" to understand the boy’s true nature. The narwhal teaches her to blend in with the "Kansan ice" to survive.

Later, as an adult, she adopts the smile of an axolotl. This strange, neotenic salamander, which retains its juvenile features its whole life, has a permanent, unreadable smile. Nezhukumatathil deploys this smile when facing microaggressions, such as when a tenure committee member repeatedly bows and says "Namaste!" to her, despite knowing she is a Christian. The axolotl’s smile becomes a form of quiet defiance, a way to endure ignorance without surrendering her internal self. For Nezhukumatathil, these creatures are not just objects of fascination; they are teachers of survival, providing models for when to camouflage and when to find strength in one's own unique form.

Narrator: The book is a celebration of wonder, but it is also an elegy for what is being lost. Nezhukumatathil consistently pairs moments of breathtaking beauty with an awareness of their inherent fragility, often due to human impact.

The firefly is a perfect example. She cherishes childhood memories of watching their synchronous flashing in the Great Smoky Mountains, a magical light show that felt like a secret language. These moments are tied to the rare tenderness of her hardworking mother on vacation, a scent of Oil of Olay and spearmint gum that she will "cling to" long after her mother is gone. Yet, she learns that this magic is incredibly delicate. A single car’s headlights can disrupt the fireflies' rhythm for hours, interrupting their mating signals. Each year, their populations dwindle due to light pollution and habitat loss. The firefly’s blink becomes a poignant message: "I am still here, you are still here," a declaration of existence in the face of imminent disappearance.

This duality is also present in her encounter with a whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium. Snorkeling in a massive tank, she is instructed to "flatten" if one swims beneath her. When a colossal whale shark does just that, its giant, curious eyeball turning toward her, she is paralyzed with terror and awe. The experience is overwhelming, a reminder of nature’s immense power. But this wonder is complicated by guilt. She later learns the Filipino folktale of Kablay, a greedy boy who was transformed into a whale shark, his back covered in spots representing the coins he refused to share. The story, combined with the reality of the creature's captivity, leaves her with a profound sense of unease. The wonder of seeing the animal up close cannot be separated from the knowledge that it belongs in the wild, a tension captured when her young son asks of his whale shark puppet, "Where my shark family?"

Narrator: At the core of Nezhukumatathil’s world of wonders is her family. They are the source of her strength, the cultivators of her curiosity, and the living embodiment of love and resilience in the face of hardship.

This is powerfully illustrated through the story of the catalpa tree. During her childhood in Kansas, the giant leaves of the catalpa trees on the hospital grounds provided a "green umbrella," a shelter from both the sun and the "unblinking eyes" of a community that saw her and her sister as oddities. It was only years later, by secretly reading her mother’s journals, that she understood the full extent of what her mother endured. As a Filipino doctor, her mother faced daily racist taunts from patients. Yet, she maintained her professional calm, compartmentalizing the stress and returning home each day with love for her daughters. The catalpa tree, which watched over the young girls, becomes a symbol of their mother’s quiet, sheltering strength.

This theme of finding a partner who embraces one's full, wondrous, and sometimes strange self is beautifully told through the corpse flower. Known for its massive size and putrid smell, the flower became the author’s dating filter. Most men were repulsed when she described it. But one man, her future husband, was genuinely fascinated. He wanted to know more and even offered to take a road trip to see one bloom. In his reaction, she recognized a man who wouldn't flinch at the messy or the new, who would be happy when she "bloomed." Their love story, like her parents' resilience, shows that family is the soil in which wonder can truly grow.

Narrator: The book charts a long journey, both physical and emotional, toward finding a place of true belonging. This search is marked by periods of intense loneliness and displacement, but it ultimately leads to a profound sense of being rooted.

The author’s "darkest and loneliest year" came in high school after a move to Ohio. In a massive new school, she felt invisible, eating lunch alone in bathroom stalls and stairwells. She describes this as her "cephalopod year," a time when she wished she could be like a vampire squid and disappear into the deep, dark sea. But this period of isolation was not permanent. She eventually found friends on the speech and debate team and the tennis court, "kinfolk" who believed that "If one of us does well, we all do well." That shadow year taught her a deep empathy for lonely students and the importance of checking in with her own children to ensure they feel safe and seen.

This search for home culminates decades later. After years of moving for school and work, she and her husband accept jobs in Mississippi. Having lived in the Midwest and Northeast, she is unsure what to expect. But from the moment she arrives, she feels an undeniable connection to the landscape. She writes, "I could feel a shift in my body the first day we opened the door and stepped foot in Oxford, like tiny magnets in me lined up and snapped to attention because I was finally where I needed to be." Like the red-spotted newt, which returns to its home pond to breed, she had finally found the place she was meant to be, a landscape that felt like a true home.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from World of Wonders is that wonder is not a passive experience, but an active practice. It requires patience, curiosity, and the willingness to slow down and pay attention. Nezhukumatathil shows that by observing the natural world with an open heart, we can find mirrors for our own lives, lessons in resilience, and a deeper connection to our place on the planet. The book argues that in a world of constant distraction and accelerating environmental loss, this practice is more essential than ever.

The book’s final challenge is a quiet but urgent one. In an age when children are more likely to recognize corporate logos than local flora, and when many have never even seen a firefly, what are we losing? Nezhukumatathil asks us to look up from our screens and notice the world. Find the catalpa tree offering shade, listen for the cardinal’s call, and wait for the firefly’s first glimmer. For in that slowdown, in that moment of quiet observation, we might just find a kind of love for the world, and for ourselves.