There are echoes of the great WH Hudson in an autistic teenager’s intimate reflections on the complex pleasures of immersion in nature
I picked up Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist with a degree of trepidation. It’s a hard thing to review the work of a teenager, harder still when his writing has been praised effusively by nature writers and naturalists alike. The diligent reviewer feels the need to balance kindness with serious critical examination, to see past the novelty of the backstory. McAnulty’s book follows a year in his life – from spring equinox to spring equinox, from his 14th to 15th birthday – as he and his family move from their home in County Fermanagh to a new life on the other side of Northern Ireland, in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains in County Down.
Four of the five members of McAnulty’s family are non-neurotypical – only Dara’s conservationist father isn’t autistic. McAnulty was diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s as a child and his condition is intimately tied up in both his writing and his interest in nature. His prose is both spirited and spiritual, performing an intensive phenomenological survey of the wildlife around his home, bringing the reader into deep, occasionally uncomfortably close communion with the insects, plants and, above all, the birds of Northern Ireland.
His portrait of loving parents raising three neurodivergent children on poetry, punk and puffins is profoundly moving
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