Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audiobook in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Stats:
4.5 rounded up
(Losing .5 for an editorial choice I’ll explain below)
About 4 hours audiobook at 2x speed
Narrator choice = 10/10

Stepping into Riley Black’s voice was like coming back home after a beautiful fresh coat of paint. As someone who has read a lot of “dinosaur” books, this was a fresh perspective on the earth and its plant life from a voice I haven’t encountered before. This is distinctly “lefter” than many science books and distinctly “queerer”

Fans of Steve Brusatte’s “The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs” will enjoy stepping onto the other (even more ancient) side of the coin as Black looks at the evolution of plant life on earth in tandem with the animals who thrived on changing landscapes.

I found this to be incredibly readable even with the dense scientific language. Black parallels vivid and often fun and irreverent imagery with technological and biological terms that, in context, even a lay person such as myself could understand. Blacks voice is buoyant and inviting. I put down all the other books I was reading just to finish this one.

Black also balances “what we know, what we think, and what [she] just supposes” and is very open about that. I listened to the audiobook which meant I had to listen to the entire appendix (FIFTEEN SECTIONS!!!!) where this discussion mostly takes place AFTER listening to the whole book. This is a lovely statement of transparency that allows reality and imagination to work in tandem to make this an enjoyable read. My only complaint here is I think the appendix where fact and fiction is acknowledged should have come right after the chapter it references rather than all of the appendix coming at the end. Not a big deal tho. It just had the effect of feeling like I was listening to the same book twice in a row, one with more imagery and one with more “this is how the field is and how I made up the imagery.” if that makes sense. That may feel different when reading the physical book.

I also thought the ending concluding leap into queerness, rather than the expected general environmental statement, was a fresh and unique perspective fueled by Black’s openness about her own identity.

All in all, I think the people who find this book will love it. I’m sure absolute experts will find issues with it, and if you literally don’t care about ancient earth at all, this may not be for you. I can see why this kind of nonfiction may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was enthralled. For a day, I felt like an expert in ancient plant life evolution as Black’s verdant language enveloped me. And don’t worry, there are plenty of creatures here too.

Absolutely fascinated by how evocative Black's writing was in this narrative nonfiction. I loved every second of this listen and adored the glimpses into what the pre-historic past might have looked like and how plants lived intertwined with various organisms. Fantastic nature writing that shone even more with the narration by Wren Mack. I seriously felt immersed in the narrative.

I love books like this, I am a big science nerd so anything that goes over the world came to be and how everything evolved is an automatic favorite. The information was well thought out, researched, and delivered. the narrator was great and made it all come to life. Such a good informational book!

This is an absolutely fascinating look at early plant life on earth and how the development of fauna and flora have affected each other. The imagery is so vivid and the authors enthusiasm so infectious that I was completely absorbed even when I lacked the scientific background to understand all the details

Fascinating, often funny, and with enough heart to make this an incredibly important read. This was the sort of popular science book that's so easy to ingest -- but has hefty appendices that feel like just a step deeper into the sciences, encouraging readers to push beyond the level of complexity they may feel limits them.

This is a 3.5, but that concluding essay REALLY persuaded me to round up rather than down.

I won't lie, I took a bit of a gamble picking this one up; I will admit to being a basic bitch who largely only cares about the "charismatic" fossils as the author calls them: dinosaurs and other large megafauna. Frankly, exigent plants don't much fascinate me beyond the vague, distant desire to love and appreciate "nature" so it was a safe bet that ancient extinct plants would do little more for me. Still, I hold to the belief that anything can be interesting if you give it a chance and so, I gave it the old college try.

Black is clearly incredibly passionate about the subject, so if you're one of those people who can appreciate anything if the one telling you about it is in love with the subject, you'll be right at home. The book is structured as a series of ancient vignettes; stories told through what can be learned from appropriate plant fossils of various geological epochs. From the primordial soup to several hundred years ago, we learn how plant fossils can tell us about the state of the earth at various times, the way animals lived, and the methods by which present life on our planet came to be. Much of it is incredibly fascinating though I found myself getting bored with some of the narratives the author constructed as a vehicle for delivering what might otherwise be some fairly dry science. This method of hiding our science pills in a roll of short story style narrative cheese might be very much to many people's liking, so on this point I will concede I am likely in the minority.

The book ends with a personal essay that is passionate, revelatory, and caused me to genuinely look at everything I had previously read with a new context that was simply put - beautiful. What I'm left with is a decently informative, well-told nonfiction series of short stories that are good but not great and a fantastic little essay that elevated the whole experience. I can't tell you to pick this book up if ancient plants don't pique your interest, but if you take the chance and give it a try like I did, you might learn something - whether it be about science, life, or gaining perspective.

Thank you to Net Galley and MacMillan Audio for advanced access to this audiobook. Expected date of publication is February 25, 2025 at time of writing.