Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have just tried to start this review several times but I’ve never been quite able to figure it out. So let’s start with the facts: Diary of a Young Naturalist has had a lot of buzz about it. It’s written by a young author and so connects with my research areas of interest. And I’ve taken a while to get round to reading it. One of the reasons for this is that nature writing has never really been my area of choice. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy it – far from it – but rather that I’ve never really sought it out as my first area of interest. My heart was always with school stories and with ponies and the fiction side of things.
But Dara McAnulty is the sort of writer that makes you reconsider everything. He writes with such a sense of purpose and identity and every page is full of such a big thick fat love for the world that you can’t help but be bowled along with it. It is remarkable stuff and if he continues to write, there will be wonderful things ahead. I always dislike that sense of writing about juvenilia, when the reviewer says ‘oh this author will achieve remarkable things but has not done so yet’, and so this is the part where I say that he has already written things better than most. This book is remarkable. It slips and slides in and out of poetry and makes you just see everything differently around you.
Alongside his writing about the natural world, McAnulty also writes about his life as an autistic teenager (his mother and two siblings are also autistic and his father is not). His writing here is particularly remarkable stuff and vibrates with such a love and warmth for his family and all that they do. Whether it’s mixing magic spells and leaving them in jars or traipsing through the muddy woods or wild swimming, this remarkable family lives and loves and works because they are together.
I was struck as well by McAnulty’s writing about education. He talks about how the arrangement of a classroom can impact his ability to learn and about the difference between surviving and thriving at school. There’s a lot here that the people who make decisions should listen to.
Overall, this really does deserve all of the plaudits that it’s received. It’s genuine and beautiful and eloquent and richly wonderful and all of it is enveloped in such a sense of love for the world and everything in it that you can’t resist it. I adored it. It’s remarkable.
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Daisy May Johnson 