Have you ever thought about kidnapping a snowman’s butt? If you have, the essay “By Degrees” in author-illustrator A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity will leave you feeling very seen. If you haven’t, you may want to once you’ve experienced Greene’s chronicle of a weeklong, snowstorm-induced Texas power outage at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Greene quips that “there is a particular adrenaline to driving no more than ten miles per hour” on icy roads. She observes that “house after house, the rain chains were frozen exquisitely, wholly enveloped, long and bumpy and clear like the plastic icicle ornaments I hung with my mother on the Christmas trees of my youth.” On Greene’s fifth day without water, she considers melting snow in a bucket, and delivers a wonderfully operatic snowman-centric internal monologue: “Surely pilfering knows some bounds and one of them is robbing a snow bottom. Surely you cannot just take a tuchus. . . . Surely, to do so is a kind of kidnapping, of wonder and innocence, along with the weather-dismembered rump.”
We won’t spoil whether Greene completes that heist, but will note that the other 25 essays in No Less Strange or Wonderful possess a similarly heady mix of insightful contemplation nicely tinged with wackadoo humor and poetic poignancy. She comments on both politics and winged insects in “Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps,” teases out snobbery in “Speaking of Basheis” and pulls back the curtain on the annual Twist and Shout balloon twisters’ convention in “Until It Pops.”
Fans of her 2020 debut, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, will be glad to know Greene shares museum tales here, too, from dressing up Rusty (a model of a sloth) in holiday garb to pondering the concepts of extinction and collection. Museums, she writes, are places where “we might stumble on something so stunning it takes us out of ourselves for a moment, compels us in some manner, and leaves us changed—leaves us better, I hope.” The hope, ’tis true, of essayists as well. Readers who enjoy books rife with curiosity and curiosities, with artistry of word and illustration, will delight in No Less Strange or Wonderful. It’s an aptly titled gem of a read.
