An Essay Collection Reviewed

I’ve been a fan of John Green for a long time. I read his young adult novels and kept them on my shelf at school (they almost always disappeared and never returned). His writing is super smart and always interesting. His teenage characters think deeply and feel deeply. He tackles mental illness, grief, and death. He meets teens where they are and doesn’t flinch at what they may be facing.

So when I saw he had written a book of essays, I had to get The Anthropocene Reviewed. In the intro, he explains that the Anthropocene is the geologic age in which we are living, and so his idea was to write short essays about many aspects of current life--from CNN to MarioKart to his favorite band, the Mountain Goats--and, at the end, to review them with a star ranking. 

I’m not a fan of star rankings, to the deep disappointment of my husband and son, who always want to know my top five everything or my absolute favorite anything. But I really liked the structure for The Anthropocene Reviewed. The short form essay worked really well; each essay was unique and deeply personal, besides being well-researched; and the star review at the end was a fun thing to anticipate. I caught myself flipping to see the rating before I started the essays.

Green’s essays did all the things I love in his young adult fiction, but my favorite thing was the vulnerability in them. He reflects at length on how people think he is the characters in his novels, and how that can eat away at a person. In these essays, the reader just sees John Green, with no characters in the way, and he describes fears, discusses his OCD, and shares his hopes. Reading this book felt like sitting around a table with my husband and some friends, passing the queso as they rank their experiences, trading stories, laughing and then going quiet, and then somebody says, “Name your top five…”

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.