At the end of Nezhukumatathil’s sophomore year of high school, the family moves again to a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. They take family road trips to national parks in the summertime and often stop by the side of the road to look at fireflies. The sisters return to Arizona, and then the whole family moves to Gowanda, a small town in Western New York. On the hospital grounds, Nezhukumatathil finds shade under catalpa trees. Nezhukumatathil’s white classmates make fun of her for getting off the bus at a mental hospital and make racist comments about her mother.
Nezhukumatathil draws a peacock for an animal-drawing contest in third grade, but her teacher makes her start over, saying that peacocks aren’t “American.” At the end of fifth grade, she and her sister move to Kansas to live with their mother, who works at and lives on the grounds of Larned State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Kansas. They play with children in the neighborhood after school, and their father takes them hiking on desert trails on the weekends. Through fifth grade, Nezhukumatathil and her younger sister live with their father in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. At age four, she is given a glass bracelet by her Indian grandmother, which she credits with sparking her fascination with color. They live in Chicago and a small town in Iowa for the first few years of Nezhukumatathil’s life. Nezhukumatathil’s mother is Filipina, and her father is from Kerala, India.
While the chapters alternate between personal and scientific information, they are loosely chronological and provide an outline of the major events of Nezhukumatathil’s life. Throughout the book, she draws connections between the wildlife and her own life, often comparing an animal’s traits or habits to her own and reflecting on her and her family’s encounters with particular species. Nezhukumatathil explains particularly unique features or behaviors of various species, such as the axolotl’s ability to regenerate limbs or the corpse flower’s nauseating odor. Each chapter of World of Wonders contains both scientific and poetic descriptions of a particular species of plant or animal.
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