Publishers Weekly
★ 01/29/2024
In these genre-defying essays, Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest), a creative writing instructor at the University of Cambridge, discusses the peregrinations of plant species in relation to her family’s migrations. Born to a Welsh father and Taiwanese mother while both lived in Canada in the 1970s, Lee contends that the contrasting teatime rituals of her maternal and paternal grandparents speak to the historical rifts between China and Britain over the tea plant. She chronicles how Britain supplied China with opium from its Indian colonies in exchange for tea, which was subject to import tariffs that funded Britain’s colonial enterprise. Reflecting on the pine species she’s encountered while living in Canada, England, and Germany, Lee describes the trees “as migrants making do” for their resilience, adaptability, and easily spread seeds. Elsewhere, she traces the domestication of soybeans in connection with her grandmother’s family’s soy sauce business and how humanity’s interventions in the natural world make it difficult to determine whether species are invasive or native. Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline (in the poignant final essay addressed to her newborn child, Lee writes, “Above us the hawthorn leafs out against a pale blue sky. You watch the play of light and shadow it creates, cooing each time you round your lips and exhale”). This deserves a wide audience. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Bookshop, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
"A terrific work on how borders work to keep both people and plants separated." —Lorraine Berry, The Los Angeles Times
"Contemplative, elegant." —Sophie McBain, The New Statesman
"Weaving material from literary, personal, scientific and historical sources, Lee examines plants—including seaweed and far beyond it—that broach human borders, exploring their migrations alongside her own . . . Lee writes intimately about her own oscillating cravings for movement and rootedness against a backdrop of COVID and new motherhood . . . Dispersals asks readers to consider how plants challenge not only spatial borders but taxonomic ones." —Erica Berry, Scientific American
"Lee’s lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research and intimate memories—memories that are by turns sharply vivid and pleasantly hazy with the distance of time." —Katja Vujić, The Cut
"In a time of uncertainty and climatic instability, Dispersals is a quiet yet probing meditation on what it means to inhabit our world as we've made it." —Rose Rankin, BookBrowse
"Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings—by people and by plants—to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration." —Amy Brady, Literary Hub
"Exquisite, haunting . . . Lee continues her insistent, clear-eyed quest for nourishment and vitality, even when both are complicated, and encourages readers to do the same." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Richly textured . . . These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee’s voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Lee writes lucidly about her encounters with various plant species and poses reflective questions about plants and her own sense of belonging. Memoir readers interested in plants and environmental studies especially will find a poignant meditation on the parallels between plants and human societies when it comes to life's transitions and movements." —Booklist
"The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion.'" —Kirkus Reviews
"Exquisite, haunting . . . Lee continues her insistent, clear-eyed quest for nourishment and vitality, even when both are complicated, and encourages readers to do the same." —Shelf Awareness
Library Journal
★ 12/01/2023
In this richly textured work, environmental historian Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest) mines a variety of sources—personal, scientific, literary, historical—to explore the entwined paths of plants and humans. The book's 14 essays originated in "Non-Native Species," a column Lee wrote for Catapult magazine. Of Canadian, British, and Taiwanese ancestry and, at the time she wrote the book, an itinerant scholar in COVID-stricken Europe, Lee brings an interesting perspective to her discussion of non-native plants, which she calls "migrants." These migrant plants include those that move through weedy wiles (heath star moss), crop plants collected by imperial directive (tea), trees relocated via diplomatic or hegemonic endeavor (flowering cherry), and more. The author views her subject through a postcolonial lens. For example, in the brilliant chapter "Frontier," readers witness that sensibility developing as Lee surveys (and reconsiders) the work of botanists/explorers such as David Fairchild, Walter Tennyson Swingle, and Kin Yamei. VERDICT These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee's voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book.—Robert Eagan
Kirkus Reviews
2024-01-20
Sweeping histories and personal narratives of our entangled lives with plants.
In this follow-up to Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, British Canadian Taiwanese author Lee delivers a memoir couched in botanical and environmental history. Chronicling the tension in her familial history of migration and travel and evoking a naturalist’s sense of an individual within an ecological system, the author presents a vision of belonging that relies on flux, extraction, and replanting rather than stasis. She follows the lead of “plants that, in dispersal, might teach us what it means to live in the wake of change.” In a narrative that often brings to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lee strives to trace the often unseen yet volatile interface between plant and human life. The subjects of chapters have recognizable features that guide readers to broader narratives of that shifting border. Cherry trees, when exported from Japan, appear as unnatural features abroad and symbols of national influence often in colonial contexts, and they typify a host of historical arborists tracing nationalist lineages in trees. The tea leaves that fixated a national thirst continents away in turn fueled systems of British colonial extraction and influence in China, India, and the Caribbean. Individual species fallen upon by humans with specific hungers and ambitions soon adapt to these new environmental demands and in turn shape the desires and worldviews of their propagators. Lee asserts that as much as this influence is anthropogenic, it would be wrong to say that these plants do not shape our human evolution, captivating our tastes, consuming our attentions, and determining our political histories. Throughout, the author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection.
An insightful meditation on nature and identity within “a world in motion.
