Book Review: Wild Hope

Reviewed by Leona Lortie

Wild Hope is a beautiful collection of short stories exploring the beauty of creation, framed in an invitation to act. The stories of endangered animals featured in each chapter, which draw us into worlds of amazing complexity and dire threats, are woven together with stories of humans who passionately care about their future.

Through each week of Lent, readers discover the realities of four animals on the brink of extinction, grouped in sets describing the source of their common suffering. The animals, representing a wide range of species and environments, all suffer from factors which can be traced back to human intervention. These factors include a changing climate, population growth, and maybe most devastating, complacent human minds. Intricately and intimately, their stories strike at the heart of the predicament of our interconnectedness. In the introduction, Boss invites the reader to consider what the future for most of these creatures steeped in uncertainty might tell us about our collective future.

Because of wild hope and a lot of unrelenting hard work, animals like the takhi, having been saved, nursed, and protected, are once again found in the wildness of Mongolia. Through these stories, Boss inspires us to learn more about endangered species, but even more importantly, she aims to invite us and spark in us the wild hope that drives the passion of those humans who take on the seemingly impossible tasks of saving animals from the brink of extinction.