Book Review: NO LESS STRANGE OR WONDERFUL: ESSAYS IN CURIOSITY by A. Kendra Greene

elichvar
Oct 14
6 min read

A. Kendra Greene

No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity

Tin House / March 2025 / 228 pp / $28.95

Reviewed by Laura Johnsrude / October 2025

In No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity, author and artist A. Kendra Greene marvels at the world—her personal, in-the-moment experiences—with luscious granularity. The title page notes the contents are “written and illuminated by A. Kendra Greene,” and a variety of shades-of-black images supplement the essays—insects flitting down the cream-colored page edges; armadillos across a double-page spread; a schematic of telescope optics; Kodak negatives of a reclining dog. Both the writing and the illustrations highlight Greene’s affection for collections and taxonomy. Indeed, the author’s last book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, explored singular museums on the island of Iceland.

Accompanying Greene’s illuminations are twenty-four personal essays of varying lengths bearing titles such as “It Looks Like a Tiger” and “Sack of Gravel” and “Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps.” The thread connecting the pieces is Greene’s museum-curator-level attention to whatever draws her gaze. She pulls the subjects close, turns them this way and that, poking bruises, opening cabinets, dipping into digressions, and finding meaning and metaphors. Greene isn’t restless or impatient to be elsewhere, isn’t whining or bemoaning the state of things. In these essays, Greene is fully present, pointing at (seemingly) quotidian stuff and conjuring connection and delight, as depicted in “My Mother Greets the Inanimate,” when the author’s mom calls out “Hello, Mountains!” from the driver’s seat as the family car reaches the top of a California hill. The author’s teenaged brother replies, prompting a back-and-forth of salutations:

“Hello, Bonnie!” the mountains now replied, the words slowed down, dropped into a deep and resonant register, as if reverberating from bedrock.

“Hello, clouds!”

“Hello, rocks!”

“Hello, lizard!”

Hello, Bonnie! Echoed back in wisps and clatters and hiss.

If it hadn’t registered before, it was now an event.

I found myself alert to what tangents Greene would take in No Less Strange or Wonderful, as her dips are unique and chock full of novel information. In “By Degrees,” a rare Dallas wintry freeze (during Covid times) causes power and water outages, leading to ruminations about the coexistence of beauty and peril and whether societal norms must be observed in times of crisis. Days without heat lead to descriptions of animals that alter their metabolisms in deep cold. The paucity of water leads to pondering what costume/disguise to wear for the dark-of-night abduction of a neighbor’s remaining snowman torso (to melt into toilet water). When she, indeed, finds herself walking down the middle of her dark street, holding aloft the ball of snowman ice, “Like a one-person marching band, I thought, a one-person float,” we read about Texas homecoming corsages, then dive into the story of Lady Godiva, the legends, and art history.

In some essays, the geographical places are mentioned (Iowa, Chile, Iceland, California, Dallas, Chicagoland), but the more pertinent markers are within the essays mentioning institutions that collect, curate, and store, as Greene’s resume includes employment in museums and, once, in a zoo (Santiago, Chile). Such environments are rich sources for creative nonfiction, and Greene excels in figurative language: listings, sensory details, wordplay, juxtapositions, metaphors. She shapes her pieces to include bits of science or math or myths or semantics, finding layers and revealing associations.

In the unforgettable “Winston Became a Speck,” Greene tells a child (over and over again) the story of a dog chasing a bird down the shore, until the dog (Winston) became hard to see, getting smaller and smaller as he ran further and further away. She lingers on why her small friend wants to hear the story retold, and on the word speck, the “pop-crack” of it, then the concept of things disappearing, the concept of naught (from Babylonians to typewriters), the concept of naming (the word “zero”), and Fibonacci and poets and mapmakers:

It dawned on me, telling after telling, that she was studying the map of this story, weighing its evidence. She seemed to be gathering data. She was, I think, not so much imagining the visual effect of the distance on the human eye; she was testing a vanishing point. She was peering out at the imperceptible. She was considering the stone-cold fact of a creature traveled to the brink.

Greene is frequently playful, as in “Letting The Universe In” where she considers her relationship to other beings without ever stating that The Universe is a cat. “Until It Pops” is about the time a friend named Laura (BFFUIP = “best friend forever until it pops”) creates and adorns the author in a Marilyn Monroe-type balloon dress at the Annual Balloon Twisters’ convention in Oak Brook, Illinois.

In “Speaking of Bashei,” Greene’s sister’s partner, Louise, adopts a stray dog, “long and broad with diminutive little legs,” “some variation of basset hound and shar-pei,” and calls it Cypress Merlot. Then Louise, Greene, and her siblings fabricate a canine breed and tell strangers Cypress Merlot is a bashei (embellishing their stories, over time), whenever approached with the line, “That’s a funny-looking dog.”

The author is in her childhood bedroom in “The Half Story,” hearing and smelling a wild creature above her, in the attic. She names the thing Mortimer and brings him alive with her alliteration and pacing:

The scraping, first. Then what sounded for all the world like the rhythmic, labored footfall of a full-grown human being. Eventually, a whole orchestra of concatenation. I came to know its rasping scratching shuffle, its thudding scramble brushwork, the precise focused industry of it, the group and guess and fumble of it, the thump, the turn-around, the dig.

A particular theme in No Less Strange or Wonderful is metaphor itself. The book is awash with metaphors, and the term is discussed on the page, even once referencing the idea of a “metaphor consultant.” In “The One,” Greene discusses apophenia as “. . . a human tendency to see connections, to find patterns, though they aren’t really there,” and pareidolia, a term for finding meaning in pictures, noting “I find them both very endearing, how primed we are for recognition, for sense, for something to matter.”

Something matters deeply to the author in “To Ashes,” which dwells on the loss of a close friend, Michael, and the aftermath of visiting his ranch and puzzling what he’d meant when he’d told her that he left something in his house for her to find. In the pages of the essay, Greene collects and disposes of trash around the periphery of the property, and she gathers cedar brush, feeding it to a burn pit, over days and days. Wood catches and burns, dies down, smolders, then comes back, with more fuel. A metaphor for grief, for sure: “I have a fire to feed. I have more grief to burn.”

In the final essay of No Less Strange or Wonderful, “People Lie to the Giraffe,” the author relays the experience of speaking to her young friends with her hand puppet, Giraffe. She doesn’t put a cloth puppet on her hand; she makes her hand and fingers and forearm into a puppet and carries on conversations with kids, who speak directly to Giraffe, with all seriousness. Greene thinks about the “camelopard in medieval bestiaries,” and whether it’s okay to go along with a child who declares there’s a Mean Giraffe as well as a Nice Giraffe, and the distinction between a child’s inquiries: ‘“Is that true?” and “Are you fibbing?”’ A fine distinction, indeed.

I have two married friends who, upon retirement, bought an Airstream travel trailer and began driving many miles, in all directions, across North America, posting Instagram photos of stunning views and historical plaques on lighthouses and puffins and humpback whales and the world’s biggest rocking chair and the minutiae on walls and shelves of quirky museums. I thought of these friends as I read No Less Strange or Wonderful, recognizing the parallel satisfaction and delight in the ordinary, the ready world around us, right here.

As A. Kendra Greene remarks in the last chapter of No Less Strange or Wonderful: “Giraffe also knows this is exactly how it is: everything a marvel. Every last thing.”

Laura Johnsrude’s creative nonfiction pieces have been published in Fourth Genre, Bellevue Literary Review, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Brevity, Hippocampus Magazine, Intima, The Examined Life Journal, Swing, Sweet: A Literary Confection, The Spectacle, Please See Me, and Minerva Rising. She is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee and a graduate of Spalding University’s Master of Arts in Writing program, Professional Writing track.