Yellow by Amy Pence (Review by Erin Woodward)

(Sponsored Book Review) I’ll be honest, I picked this one up because of the cover and then almost put it back down when I read “slime mold” in the description. A slime mold. As a main character, basically. I know. Stick with me though, because this book ended up being one of those reads that snuck up on me. Yellow follows a girl named Z (or Eliza, depending on which point in her life we’re in) starting in 1973, the same summer as the Watergate hearings and the Skylab launch, when she finds this strange organism growing in her backyard in Louisiana. She names it Yellow. And somehow, through this book, a slime mold becomes one of the more emotionally resonant characters I’ve read in a while. I did not expect to tear up over pond scum but here we are. The book jumps around in time a lot. We get Z at twelve, and then Z decades later as an artist in her sixties, looking back at everything that happened in between, Vietnam, Katrina, even Covid eventually. It’s a lot of ground to cover and there were a couple points where I had to flip back a few pages to remind myself what decade I was in. I don’t think that’s necessarily a flaw, more just a heads up if you’re the kind of reader who likes things linear. What got me was how Pence writes. She’s a poet first, and it shows, sometimes almost too much. There’s a chapter that’s only three sentences long. A few times I found myself rereading a paragraph not because I was confused but because it was just, well, pretty. There’s a real Southern gothic mood to the whole thing that I loved, that sense of heat and heaviness sitting over everything. I’ll say the plot doesn’t always move in a way that feels urgent. This isn’t a page turner in the thriller sense. There’s a genuinely dark thread running through it too, an incident with a predator at the lake that shapes a lot of what happens to Z later, and it’s handled with care but it’s there, so worth knowing going in. This is more of a sit-with-it kind of book, one you want to read slowly, maybe with a notebook nearby because you’ll want to underline things. What I kept coming back to, and honestly why I think this one belongs in a Gloss pick, is that it’s a book about connection in the strangest possible form. A kid and a slime mold. But really it’s about the person you needed to understand you when nobody else did, whatever form that showed up in. That’s a conversation I want to have with a room full of people. Would recommend for readers who liked Remarkably Bright Creatures and want something a little stranger, a little more literary, and honestly a little braver.