I have to admit, I didn't want to like this book. You've heard of Elizabeth Gilbert, right? Of Eat, Pray, Love fame? I really enjoyed that memoir and thought that probably a fictional book by her wouldn't be as awesome. You can't do everything well, after all. And instead of being a good comrade in writing (as if I even compare to a best selling author), I kind of wished that she wouldn't do everything well. But apparently she does. This is a phenomenal book.
The plot and characters are refreshingly but deceptively simple: it follows the life of one woman from birth to death. Alma Whittaker is born in 1800 to an enormously successful and wealthy pharmaceuticals magnate. As a brilliant but physically unattractive child, she has a charmed early life with no friends but many interactions with adult geniuses and other interesting people. Her life is less enviable as she grows older and begins to lose the few people who are close to her. Never allowed or daring to leave her home in Philadelphia, the walls of her world begin to close in, so she turns to botanical research, which as always been at the heart of their home. Her research brings her joy and eventually more relationships and adventures in travel, some of them heartbreaking but all of them interesting.
Aside from publication jealousy, another reason I expected not to enjoy this book as much as I did is that it's so very much about science. Alma is a scientist above all else and there is a good bit of evolutionary theory that threatened to go over my head and interests. In writing about scientific research, Gilbert must have done a great deal of her own research, plus more about the customs, language and even philosophical and cultural leanings of the nearly 100 years and multiple settings in the book. Yet she manages to distill it down for the most part, writing at some times in generalities and when necessary in specifics that don't bore. Alma also dabbles in the gray area between the scientific and the spiritual, hence the title, which mixes things up enough to keep me interested.
Reading back on this post, it still sounds like a book I wouldn't enjoy. But truly, I did, and not just because I think I should. It has all my must-haves: likeable characters who snuck into myheart, a bit of suspense to keep me wondering and reading, the opportunity to live in another time and place for a short time. So congratulations, Elizabeth Gilbert. I guess I'll just have to like you and your sweet, wise face smiling from the book jacket. If only you could give me a hand in this publishing thing!
