The author of this book, Lucy, is a friend and colleague with whom I’ve worked at Wild Justice and on other projects and I was nervous about whether I would get on with this book. After all, she is a young person, the same age as my kids, and young people see the world in different ways, are prone not to recognise a split infinitive and can gush uncontrollably about their enthusiasms. Well, there is some of that going on in this book but I can honestly say that I think it is a very good book.
The format is that Lucy goes for a walk with a dozen different friends through the year and they look for nature and talk about what they find and what they feel. Very importantly, this brings a variety of different people and their feelings into these pages and also a whole wealth of wildlife. Lucy is a wonderful naturalist and that shines through these pages. She really knows her stuff and that means that her enthusiasm for nature is grounded in a much deeper understanding of what she is seeing than is true of many of us. That helps makes this an exceptional book.
This is a book about emotions and feelings for nature and so there is a lot of enthusiasm but the darker side is here too, and that makes the book a much more interesting read. Can nature revolt us? Can it make us feel guilty about what ‘we’ are doing to it? Can it simply be a symbol for how the world is getting worse all the time? And if there is any truth in those views how should we cope with them? Lucy’s answers to those questions are in these pages and they are helpful models for what might be the views of many of us. Just thinking about them will take you further down the path to your own position.
There is a particularly touching couple of pages about Lucy’s diagnosis with, treatment for, and recovery from Hodgkin Lymphoma. So the enthusiastic gushing is balanced by doses of astringency and together they are a varied and thought-provoking fare.
There are many people who seem to think that they can write about nature, and how it makes them feel, but there aren’t very many who write about it in as distinctive, amusing, thought-provoking and, yes, sometimes slightly irritating a way as Lucy does. I recommend this book highly, maybe particularly for grumpy old men to read, and I reckon it stands a good chance of being in my top 10 nature books of 2026 even though we are only in February.
The cover? I’d give it 7/10.
Love is a Toad: exploring our relationship with nature by Lucy Lapwing is published by Blink Publishing.
You could buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase
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Entirely agree with your comments about leaving Twitter (I refuse to even call it by the new name), now run by that contemptible thing Musk. Well done to @rspb @bto @wildlifetrusts @wwt @nationaltrust @wwf_uk @savebutterflies @love_plants for leaving it. Always good to see those who care about nature acting with principle.
You say “Reform are probably going to have a larger and larger say in UK politics”. That is just one reason we need proportional representation #MakeVotesMatter