A delicious balance of the zoological and the personal. Imbler manages to gaze both inward to the self and outward to the strange selves of the creatures in the world's waters ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN, author of Harmless Like You A pinwheel of awe spinning one 'wow' after another SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA, author of How to Pronounce Knife

From a brooding octopus mother that starves herself while looking after her eggs we get the author's thoughts on their relationship with their mother and their unhealthy body image. From the life of a Chinese Sturgeon we get their thoughts on their grandmother and mother's origins in China and their family's immigration to the US. Particularly harrowing is their essay on the Sand Striker Worm (formerly named after an abuser whose penis was severed by his victim) and their thoughts on consent and sexual assault in their own life. There are many more essays here as well, each fascinating for the illustrations they provide for all the identities that the author embodies. Imbler writes magnificent essays about being queer in a straight world, being mixed race in a white world, being gender queer in a binary world, and relates the sometimes elusive experiences and intractable challenges through the mysterious lives of creatures who come from deep in the sea. Imbler tries to bridge the worlds she straddles with her existence and her writing, using the animals' colorful lives, fruits of creative genetics. Each of the essays is about another lesson on survival and adaption that Imbler sees reflected in the history of her life, and in the wild of the ocean. Reading notes This book is after a few chapters, so far successful, very strange mix of science, being young and gay and full of angst, and the story of her mother in China. It's quite unclassifiable but interesting. There are quite mind-boggling sentences, "My grandmother grew up believing she was ugly because everyone told her so. A friend of her father's, their wealthy neighbour's sixth concubine always told my mother she was ugly, even for a five year old." Sabrina Imbler's latest book mingles memoir and marine biology in a tender, lucid look at the author's life refracted through the deep sea. Their essays' mesmerizing descriptions of the often mysterious lives of aquatic animals also serve as portals of inquiry into Imbler's life on land Scientific Magazine

Imbler, a science journalist, shines a light on some of the ocean's most delightful and overlooked creatures... the author draws connections between these fascinating animals and our own needs and desires - for safety, family and more New York Times Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong. ” I would be interested in either of these versions of How Far the Light Reaches, if the two had been separated: the memoir or the science. Imbler’s writing on marine biology is accessible and fascinating, so while it’s not my usual genre, I was completely pulled in. By braiding these two threads together, though, it’s more than the sum of its parts.

The personal reveries frequently cross the subtle line between candour and solipsism, the cute and the gauche, artlessness and shallowness, sincerity and cringeworthiness. Instances of romantic awakening, admissions of self-loathing, explorations of sexuality and contemplations of racial identity (Imbler is mixed race) convey personal pain but ultimately don’t strike home with much force or edge. One exception is a powerful chapter called Beware the Sand Striker, which combines a study of predators’ strategies in the natural world with incidents of male violence and harassment in the author’s own life, as well as those reported in public #MeToo testimonies. The writing is lovely; the science is usually--but not always--cleverly integrated, the perspective interesting, though occasionally so very developmentally young. I'd love to read more about what Imbler does with their life in twenty years.It seems a shame that an animal able to sense so much of the world occupies it so briefly, spends all of it at the bottom of the ocean, in darkness, at temperatures near freezing. But still, she lived.” Imbler pulls off an impressive feat: a book about the majestic, bewildering undersea world that also happens to be deeply human Vogue A superb must-read... [a] collection of fascinating essays [which] explores the wonders of rivers and oceans in the light of the writer's own life Tablet This far-reaching, unique collection shatters our preconceptions about the sea and what it means to survive. Imbler, a science journalist, shines a light on some of the ocean's most delightful and overlooked creatures...Along the way, the author draws connections between these fascinating animals and our own needs and desires - for safety, family and more New York Times