Book review of This Is How a Robin Drinks by Joanna Brichetto

When Joanna Brichetto sees potato chips, she craves goldfinches. An offbeat association? Sure. One imbued with enthusiasm and nature-loving logic? Absolutely. You see, she explains, the goldfinch’s call sounds like “potato-chip, potato-chip,” and the Lay’s Classic Potato Chips bag is a yellow “not unlike a male goldfinch in breeding plumage.” 

That perspective-shifting, find-joy-in-daily-life revelation is just one of many the blogger and certified Tennessee naturalist shares in her wonderful, wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature.

Brichetto—a former BookPage contributor —believes that “by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are.” Fortunately, “nature is all around”—and in this almanac organized by season, she encounters and explores nature in places we expect, like parks and gardens and birdbaths. But what about thrift stores, grocery bags and abandoned mall parking lots?

If we stroll rather than stride through our yards and neighborhoods, Brichetto assures us, we can find nature everywhere, too—despite humans’ relentless efforts to constrain, pave over or poison it. Readers will relish her thoughtful essays rife with idiosyncratic humor and poetic reverence, like her observation that a purchased-turf lawn has been “gentrified by sod.” 

In her summer section, Brichetto is particularly reverent toward cicadas, which can fall prey to new construction (the Nashville-based author was treated to two overlapping broods this summer). “He will sing with the moon,” she writes of one, “but I have his skin, which once held the sun.” In fall, her pockets “surrender snail shells, turn out twigs of spicebush, fumble oak apples round and dry.” A red-tailed hawk transforms her from a winter commuter to “a character in a fairy story.” And she composes a spring ode to catalpa trees, which she suggests may be “admired by pressing one’s face into a pyramid of blossom.”

This Is How a Robin Drinks is sure to trigger an uptick in meanderings—urban or rural, day or night—suffused with new appreciation for and a renewed determination to preserve our endlessly fascinating yet increasingly vulnerable environment. And not a moment too soon; after all, Brichetto writes, “Spoiler alert: nature’s best hope is us.”