Month: February 2026

The Nature Embedded Mind Review

Book: The Nature Embedded Mind
Author: Julie Brams
Publisher: Changemakers Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “The Nature Embedded Mind explores some of the most vital questions our culture is facing, regarding the broken relationship between humans and nature. Our persistent and shared delusion that we are different from the rest of nature is at the heart of why we behave in ways that destroy our own habitat. Focusing on our personal and collective beliefs, The Nature Embedded Mind shows how we can begin healing the most important relationship we have, our relationship with Earth. These pages combine the latest scientific research, personal stories, and writing prompts that will allow you to expand your own thinking. Challenging Western psychology, this book aims to prioritize its offered repair as the new foundations for mental health and social wellness.”

Review : The Nature Embedded Mind, while written by a psychotherapist and geared toward therapists and allied professionals, is ultimately a book for everyone. You might think a book about letting our collective repair with that natural world expand outward into the repair necessary with other humans would be specifically for those who already feel a deep connection with the Earth, but realistically, the message of this book is for every person on this planet. That message is namely that if we can begin to reframe our human perception of the Earth and the other-than-human beings who live here with us as being less about hierarchy and more about coexistence with our siblings, we may very well be able to find ourselves in a place that is less caustic, less inflamed, and less ill.

Over the years I’ve read several books on the benefits of Forest Bathing and how one might go about participating in such an event. Brams has created a work that does more than delve into the positive impact Forest Bathing might have on a person’s psyche; she’s created a work that’s gathered scientific data around how we as humans interact with the natural world and how we not only gain benefits from it, but how we might benefit the world around us in a relationship of equal exchange. If you’re a fan of Robin Wall Kimmerer, not only will this concept not be new to you, it will likely be quite welcome to read. While not overt, Brams readily suggests a concept that will be familiar to anyone who’s studied yoga : we are the microcosm of the macrocosm. Meaning? What happens in the natural world is reflected within our own being and vice versa. Brams suggests that we’re experiencing a collective awakening and desire to return to something we may have only experienced in childhood, a freedom that comes from an unfettered connection to and collaboration with the world around us. When we stop viewing the world and the non-human life that exists within it as separate from ourselves, Brams says, we can start to experience the necessary perspective shift for a new way of life to unfold.

The Nature Embedded Mind reads like a both manual for reshaping and reframing our collective ideals about the natural world and an introduction into the world of Forest Therapy (Brams is certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, or ANFT, and regularly leads walks for those in her area). There are periodic writing and experiential prompts throughout the book that are geared toward gently shifting the reader’s mindset away from our standard collective idea that humans exist on a hierarchy outside of nature, somehow both separate from it and at the top of the pyramid within it. The prompts allow for playfulness and exploration, and paired with the way Brams speaks about nature, it’s a gentle shaking of the norms so that the reader has the freedom within a container to begin to safely consider how they think about and interact with the non-human world around them. Concluding with a prompt that comes directly from Nature Therapy, Brams has given the reader ample room to begin their own immersive journey into forest bathing techniques, or at minimum, to begin to explore the idea of what a deeper relationship with the Earth might look like outside of a modern, Western point of view.

I found this book to be incredibly necessary and timely. I’ve already recommended it to several friends : therapists, those in therapy, and other folks in allied professions that are doing the work on their own and beginning to question if the ways we interact with the world around us are truly serving our collective consciousness. I found Brams to be quite relatable as an author and enjoyed her perspective immensely. I expected as I dove into the book that I would already have a nature embedded mind, as I consider myself pretty connected to the planet, an outdoorsy kind of gal who views herself as part of nature rather than something disconnected from it, but Brams truly challenged my way of thinking and helped me turn some of my thought patterns around on their head. It’s easy to view humanity as the top of the food chain, sitting pleasantly at the top of a hierarchical caste of sorts, but the reality is that we live in tandem with the world around us, it’s completely intertwined and our own existence is reliant on the existence and persistence of the whole of the Earth. As we witness destruction on new and unparalleled levels each year, and seemingly worse each day, finding our way back to the understanding that we are no different than the other-than-human creatures who live on this planet feels imperative to the collective survival of, frankly, everyone and everything. If the soil is as similar to me as my own hand, wouldn’t I fight long and hard to keep the soil healthy? If I enjoy time in nature as I would time with a friend, wouldn’t I take the time to clean up some trash? To fight for legislation that keeps the body of Earth well? Wouldn’t I consider her my home rather than an object?

The Nature Embedded Mind is a quick read but it’s worth taking your time with. It explores the idea that we aren’t so different from the planet and that the planet isn’t so different from us. It’s a reminder that as humans we aren’t actually separate from nature at all, but truly part of nature just like everything else on this planet. And finally, it’s an invitation to explore ways in which you connect with the planet, inviting the reader to try their hand at simply existing with the planet, to forest bathe or to seek out forest therapy or to just sit and be connected with a friend (the Earth, her abundance, her creatures, and her cycles). It’s a necessary way forward. Perhaps it’s the only way forward.

Advice : If you experience the deep, unsettled feelings of doom connected to climate change, practice meditation, enjoy being in the woods or smelling flowers or watching bees flit from flower to flower, if you’re a therapist, a yoga or Ayurveda practitioner, an activist, or simply a human being navigating existence on a planet that feels daily more and more disconnected from your life, this book is truly for you. It’s a quick read but it’s packed full of insight and wisdom and filled with journal prompts and ideas for how you might connect more deeply with the world around you and ultimately reshape your understanding of the Earth and your relationship with it.

A Zoom With A View Review

Book: A Zoom with a View
Author: Jess Cannon
Publisher: Dutton
Year: 2026
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Leo can’t believe she’s back in Blue Oak. Her small, quirky Texas hometown feels suffocating after trying to make it big as an English professor in New York – especially due to her strained relationship with her overly hair-sprayed mother, Karina. But with Leo’s career in academia in shambles, at least she’s able to work as a photographer for her godmother’s real estate business. And her best friend, Emily, is around to help her navigate through the mess – and maybe force her to reconnect with her old high school boyfriend, Mack.
But while at work, Leo makes a grisly discovery: the dead body of rival real estate agent and social media influencer Chaz. Even worse, Leo and Emily have been secretly running a snarky Reddit page making fun of Chaz’s cringe-inducing advice and duck-faced selfies. When someone Leo loves is accused of the murder, she finds herself flung headfirst into a dangerous investigation, teaming up with a local detective who grew up to be quite attractive. Meanwhile, Karina has been acting stranger and stranger, as if all her hair hides a big secret…”

Review : A Zoom with a View is a cute, sort of cozy, I-just-moved-back-home mystery I love. I extra love that it’s a mystery with a female protagonist who is neither drunk, nor having a mental break. It’s the perfect break from the (ugh) normalized unreliable female narrator trope. We need that. An entire genre of modern mystery books needs that. Jess Cannon has created a fun, hard to put down narrative of twists and turns and fun characters that feel like they stepped right out of your own lived hometown experience, and I genuinely enjoyed reading this book for all of those reasons.

Once I got into the meat of the novel, the plot was easy to follow and the mystery was fun to unravel. I did figure out whodunnit fairly early on, but I will say that the motive was unclear to me until close to the end of the book, so while you may be able to narrow it down early, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the plot. I won’t give the ending away for you, but I will tell you that I thought the villain would have a different motivation and felt the ending suffered a bit from a fairly reductive character. The final reveal felt semi-believable, but I wanted a little more depth than we were given. There’s still time, I think…

Cannon lost me early on, and I want to warn you, reader, that A Zoom with a View has an incredibly slow start and hasn’t been smoothed out in a way that felt easy to read. While it does get much better as you get into the meat of the book, the plot is a bit meta, if you’ll pardon the pun, and this is the real problem with Cannon’s rocky start. In attempting to lay the groundwork for her novel, Cannon has set herself up for some tricky narrative and it doesn’t seem to me that she’s entirely succeeded in making it something everyone will be able to follow. The main character, Leo, runs a snark subreddit centered around someone she went to high school with, Chaz, who as grown up to become a wellness influencer. Leo, and subsequently Cannon, spends a great deal of time explaining the subreddit, running through the cast of characters in Chaz’s universe, and laying out a lot of Chaz jargon. All of this feels true to life, but it’s not written in a way that brings ease to the reader. Snark subreddits aren’t new to me and I still found myself going back and rereading paragraphs, trying to wrap my head around what Cannon was attempting to describe. There’s a sweet spot you find in books where the words flow and the narrative unfurls in your mind and you don’t have to do much work as a reader, and it isn’t really until about halfway through the book that I found that sweet spot here. The first good bit requires you to work for it, and that’s hard for me to argue for. I don’t think it’s necessarily due to the content, though it’s not an easy task to describe a subreddit and an entirely made-up world, but fantasy writers world build all the time. Sometimes it reads easily and sometimes it doesn’t. This was the latter.

Once I got into the swing of things and found the rhythm of A Zoom with a View, I found myself really enjoying how things were unfolding. Like I said, I had the mystery solved pretty early on, but I enjoyed going with Leo to interview each character, seeing how things were happening in Blue Oak and in the broader Chaz snark subreddit world, and seeing my own suspicions confirmed. What really let me down, though, was the ending. I’ve found myself frustrated in recent years by suspense and mystery books that spend 90% of the novel building up to a climax, revealing the villain, and then wrapping the whole book up in the last couple of pages and unfortunately, that’s exactly what A Zoom with a View has done. It’s only in the final few pages of a pretty hefty book that we finally find out the truth behind Leo’s Mom’s secrets and as soon as we learn her secrets, the book ends. It’s a gnarly cliffhanger, if it actually is a cliffhanger. I can’t find any information online about whether this is the first of a series or at least the first of two books and the ending is so nebulous, yet still ties everything up, that I have no idea if it was meant to leave me feeling confused or it was an intentional set-up for the next book. I have to hope it’s a set-up, and I would surely read book two if there were to ever be a sequel, but it felt disjointed and rushed. The ending unraveled fast. I wanted more. So much more. I think much of what I found off-putting about this book would be a non-issue in a sequel now that the groundwork has been done. Ultimately, Cannon is an enjoyable writer who’s created an enjoyable universe and I have questions I’d like to see answered in a second book. Sign me up.

Advice : If you like a well-written mystery that doesn’t feature an unreliable female narrator, I think you should stick out the slow start and give this book a chance! It was fun and enjoyable and once I got into it I found myself swiftly turning the pages. It’s worth the read.