SOME SPOILERS and possible triggers (but not as many as are in the book).
Sometimes I wonder if people like something because they are “supposed to.” We are “supposed to” like a story about environmentalism. We are “supposed to” like something because the character(s) are of a minority (in Mother Nature by Jamie Lee Curtis, Russell Goldman, and illustrator Karl Stevens they are Native, two characters are queer, and at least two other people are of color). But that does not mean the book will be or is good. In fact, I almost stopped reading after a few pages because I felt that the death of the father of Nova (our main character) was more than “just” bad. He is killed with a pointed stone of the statue smashing into his face leaving nothing but a perfectly untouched body and blood freakin’ (only I didn’t say freakin’) every place.
I would have been okay with that if the book had been promoted as horror and not as an environmental story. It’s odd how that works out. Now, I know Curtis (yes, Halloween Curtis) is known as a Scream Queen, but that’s not what I’d expect from her. This book is really not like her other books about adoption and feelings. Oh, there are feelings, but not you know good ones. So this book started out really bad, regardless of the “shoulds.” And though I gave it a few more pages, I kept saying, “Do I want to finish? Really, where is this going? OMG WHO the hell are THOSE people? Why did that happen? WTF! She was in jail for 14 years? Who wrote this shhh…. stuff…?”
Yet, I kept going and finally at one point things started to click. And once things started to come together, the overall story came to light. The death of the father was not the last violent death, and yes, it felt they were using gore for pure shock value but okay, I’m picking up what they are putting down. The not seeming to be any logical pathways finally merged, it was bumpy still, but I was understanding things. I was getting into the fact that the Diné culture was taking front and center. The equivalent of Christian demons and angels start to take over the story. We see how they want to use the humans to destroy them. We see how the greed and insanity of humans are helping them, sometimes very knowingly. And there is much more, such as there is a whole theme flowing through about mothers, daughters, sacrifice and secrets.
It is not an easy book to read or to process. The illustrations are interesting, but not always put together. The characters are not unique, or even likeable most of the time. But it is an experience that I am glad I had and think most people will find something in it that speaks to them. However, because it is eco-horror, it is intense and very messy. And was the female villain supposed to look like Jamie Lee Curtis? Read the extras at the end to get background into the history of the creation of this book.
Now, back to the beginning of this review. I was wondering about that statement as I had not seen one review that didn’t like the book when this graphic novel was coming out and finally came out. They were promoting it, trying to sell it, but you’d hope that meant they liked it and thought it was worth their and our time. When I reviewed the book on the site I track on, I found that the overall rating of the book was less than 3; that people were giving everything from 1.5 to 3.5, with two or three ratings of five. Were the fives just because they did not want to be trolled about not liking a book about the “shoulds”? Or did they really like it? The disliked reviews were everything from WTF to things such as “I liked this but this part I couldn’t wrap my head around it.” Therefore, now I am wondering what others think. This is a book that definitely will get people talking, and hopefully doing something, about.
