World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments is a collection of essays published in 2020 by American poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Each essay is named for a specific plant or animal and contains a mixture of personal memories, scientific facts, and poetic descriptions of nature. Most of the essays were originally published individually, in publications including Water-Stone Review, Guernica, Mississippi Review, and Oxford American. World of Wonders was a New York Times best seller, a Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year, and a Kirkus Prize finalist. This guide refers to the 2020 printing by Milkweed Editions.

Plot Summary

Each chapter of World of Wonders contains both scientific and poetic descriptions of a particular species of plant or animal. Nezhukumatathil explains particularly unique features or behaviors of various species, such as the axolotl’s ability to regenerate limbs or the corpse flower’s nauseating odor. Throughout the book, she draws connections between the wildlife and her own life, often comparing an animal’s traits or habits to her own and reflecting on her and her family’s encounters with particular species.

While the chapters alternate between personal and scientific information, they are loosely chronological and provide an outline of the major events of Nezhukumatathil’s life. Nezhukumatathil’s mother is Filipina, and her father is from Kerala, India. They live in Chicago and a small town in Iowa for the first few years of Nezhukumatathil’s life. At age four, she is given a glass bracelet by her Indian grandmother, which she credits with sparking her fascination with color. Through fifth grade, Nezhukumatathil and her younger sister live with their father in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. They play with children in the neighborhood after school, and their father takes them hiking on desert trails on the weekends. Nezhukumatathil draws a peacock for an animal-drawing contest in third grade, but her teacher makes her start over, saying that peacocks aren’t “American.” At the end of fifth grade, she and her sister move to Kansas to live with their mother, who works at and lives on the grounds of Larned State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Kansas. Nezhukumatathil’s white classmates make fun of her for getting off the bus at a mental hospital and make racist comments about her mother. On the hospital grounds, Nezhukumatathil finds shade under catalpa trees.

The sisters return to Arizona, and then the whole family moves to Gowanda, a small town in Western New York. They take family road trips to national parks in the summertime and often stop by the side of the road to look at fireflies. At the end of Nezhukumatathil’s sophomore year of high school, the family moves again to a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. She has difficulty making friends at first and likens herself to a cephalopod avoiding danger, but she eventually she opens up and starts writing poetry.

Nezhukumatathil goes to Ohio State University for undergraduate and graduate school, where she enjoys going dancing with friends; she juxtaposes this information with details about the mating rituals of flamingos. She and her sister visit their grandmother in Kerala for the first time without their parents while Nezhukumatathil is in graduate school; that chapter is interspersed with Indian folk tales about different animals and their relationships to the monsoon. Nezhukumatathil spends time in Madison, Wisconsin, before returning to Western New York for a position at a university, likening her “homing instinct” to that of a red-spotted newt.

She meets and marries her husband, Dustin, and gives birth to her two sons in New York. She and Dustin rent a houseboat on their honeymoon in India, where they have a memorable experience with bonnet macaques. Her first year as a mother is a blur of shared parenting duties, work, and writing, which the author likens to the changing seasons and the cyclical patterns of nature. She takes maternity leave when her second son, Jasper, is born and appreciates the break from her academic life. The family briefly lives on an island in Greece, where Nezhukumatathil teaches; she recounts an experience with an octopus there that deepens her connection to the animal world. She finally moves with her family to Oxford, Mississippi, for a job at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches today. Just as her own parents taught her to appreciate nature, Nezhukumatathil tries to pass on her wonder for the natural world to her children.