In Plums for Months, Zaji Cox offers readers a glimpse into her childhood and adolescence in a series of colorful and concise pieces that center family, nature, art, and (un)belonging. Cox writes with rich variety: her collection is comprised of short essays, lists, experimental flash pieces, gymnastic routine scorecards, and even science homework. Despite a vacillation between different writing styles that can verge on frenetic, each scene in the book hangs together with delicate cohesion, sometimes complementing its neighboring entries thematically or formally, other times defying expectation and capitalizing on stark juxtaposition. The pace, tempo, and choreography of Cox’s writing seem informed by her artistic and athletic pursuits; she went from competitive gymnastics to professional dance and has performed with the New Mexico Ballet Company and the Polaris Dance Theater, among others.

A precocious child when it came to words, Cox was reading by age three, wrote her first short story at age nine, and published her first book in 2016. Her writing illustrates her struggles against the status quo—Cox is a neurodiverse woman of color, and even though she grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, a part of the country that is relatively culturally inclusive, Plums for Months is in part a book about stereotypes and how Cox defies them.

Cox immediately introduces this theme of divergence in the book’s opening vignette, “One Toy,” where she writes about her kinship with a “weird and wonderful” chimeric wolf-hawk action figure. “I push aside Barbie in her stained pink-and-white dress to hold the plastic creature up to my face,” she writes. “Its deep-brown eyes are the exact same shade of mine, and they scream power. My want for anything in the world has never matched my want for this right now.” Not only does Cox show us which toy she prefers in this scene, but she also flexes her literary muscles in a way that is subtle and artful. Her powerful want of “this right now” refers on the surface to the wolf-hawk chimera as the object of Cox’s desire, but a deeper reading shows us that what she truly craves is the power of the fierce action figure rather than the dainty femininity that Barbie’s gender normativity can represent.

Cox continues her expositional work with explorations of her neurodiversity, though she does well to avoid the fetishized “neurodivergence as superpower” trope that has found some popularity in both mainstream and social media, a stereotype that can be as problematic as it is empowering. In “Coming Home Smell,” Cox displays the complicated nature of neurodivergence and introduces the collection’s second most prominent theme—family. When her mother leans down to kiss her after a night out, Cox writes, “Most of the time, I pull away from small touches—my sensory irritation—but I can lie still under the weighted blanket of relief at her safe return. I am finally able to relax, the bitter scent [of cigarette smoke] intertwining with perfume that smells like the color of amber, creating the scent of mothers returned.”

Cox shows us more of the powerful, protective love that her family is capable of in “How Old,” which features several examples of untoward attention from older men. In one scene, her father puts a protective arm around Cox and rebukes a catcaller. In another scene, her mother “uses her My daughter words and energy to shove the guy with the McDonald’s cup and baseball cap away.” Elsewhere in the collection, her older sister, whom Cox calls her “sister-coach,” appears as an additional emblem of strength and guidance, at times chopping firewood to warm their aging house, at times helping Cox polish her gymnastics routines.

In addition to familial love, Plums for Months spends time exploring the natural realm, particularly those aspects of Cox’s world that are untamed or feral. These natural themes are often enlivened with elements of magical realism, a move that lends a whimsical air to Cox’s writing. In “Congregation,” a piece about a routine errand run that turns surreal, the Cox women approach their driveway and encounter a coven of black cats:

Some latecomers are strolling in, and they all face each other, calm and pacing, all swiveling heads and flicking tails…. This land, the property owned not by us but our mom’s dad with this hundred-and-ten-year-old house, the land that we have made into our home, suddenly feels like it belongs to another. Someone not human. Our mom slows the car. We three watch from afar, trying desperately to preserve this moment. Time vanishes. The black cats could be talking about anything, sinewy in their motions and slow-blinking as they look at one another. Subtle yet confident. My mom and sister whisper from the front of the car, while my reverence multiplies.

It is this type of dreamy storytelling, in which actual events are suffused with possibility and wonder, that carried me so smoothly through Cox’s collection. Beyond cat covens, other nature-magic totems that appear include two tall, thin trees that dance in the wind and frame the end of the driveway like a sort of energetic gate, a roaming pack of wild dogs that serenades Cox in the evenings, and an impossibly perfect jewel of a blackberry, plucked late in the year from the ever-encroaching edges of their property.

One of the most difficult things for any self-reflexive work to do is assert the voice of the author in a way that is confident but not overweening. At the same time, strong memoirs also convey vulnerability without lapsing into mawkish contrivance. In her piece “Mirror, I Have Some Questions,” Cox pulls off these feats of balance and grace like the gymnast that she is, and the result is a display of strength and resilience that carefully coexists with self-doubt. She writes, “Mirror, I have to know: what will stay constant? What will struggle to change? If I wish hard enough and stare into you for so long that my vision goes wavy, will it make you wavy too, enough that I can make things change?”

Though Plums for Months is slim, readers won’t want for much when the last page is turned. Cox’s memoir is a spare but complete self-portrait of an artist who struggles to fit in but comes to find security and identity in spite of (and perhaps because of) that struggle. We watch as she comes to understand that her square peg ought not to be whittled to fit into society’s round hole. Like the wolf-hawk action figure that Cox identifies with early in her memoir, Plums for Months is itself a chimera of sorts, an organic concatenation that defies easy classification but is powerfully put together.