Rating: 5/5
Review:
Exceptionally good
I thought this was an excellent book. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it nearly as much as I did because it sounded a bit worthy and turgid from the description: the life story of a wealthy 19th Century woman from Philadelphia who has an interest in the study of mosses doesn't immediately grab my attention as a must-read book, but I found it exceptionally good from beginning to end. It is readable, engrossing, extremely interesting and rather touching in many places.
The plot has been well summarized elsewhere so I won't go over it again. The story kept me reading, but what was exceptionally good, I thought, was the characterization and the sense of period. Elizabeth Gilbert creates exceptionally real, believable characters and Alma, in particular, is an engaging, flawed but deeply understandable and, to me, likeable character. Similarly, Gilbert portrays the life, the attitudes and the preoccupations of the time beautifully. Her skill in this put me in mind slightly of Patrick O'Brian, although the book is very different from O'Brian in many ways. However, it does have that wonderful gift of storytelling with excellent, readable prose and the sense of complete immersion in and understanding of the period. The language is wholly believable and there is a sense throughout of deep learning ,lightly worn.
This also comes over superbly in the intellectual insights into the period's upheavals in biology, particularly evolution. It is a rare pleasure to find such deep understanding in a novel not only of the ideas themselves but of their effect on individuals.
This a book which I was sorry to finish. It was a pleasure to read and had important things to say about all sorts of things: the nature of fulfilment and unfulfilment, of desire, of self-awareness, of what a life well-lived might be...and so on. It is simply terrific, and I recommend it in the warmest terms.
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