I lived in dread of jellyfish as a child. Sometimes, swimming in the silty water of the North Sea off the Suffolk coast on my summer holidays, I felt the unmistakable, horrid sensation of my skin brushing against the smooth, gelatinous surface of a compass jellyfish or moon jelly. My stomach turned and my skin prickled with a horror that was never just the fear of being stung.
Frankly, jellyfish freaked me out. I loved the natural world, but I couldn’t see how jellyfish fit in it. To me they were incomprehensible, alien things; transparent matter that seemed only vaguely alive. I felt a faint echo of that childhood panic when I opened Spineless and read Juli Berwald’s description of the first time she saw wild jellyfish – hundreds of thousands of them in a tidal stream in Hiroshima, moving past her in a seemingly endless flow of pink, pulsing life. But I read on, and it didn’t take long before this thoroughly engaging book turned my old horror into wonderment, and by its end into something close to love and awe.
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