Review by easnyder - State of Wonder

easnyder 's review for:

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2.5

adventurous dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

So I found this book to be absorbing but also deeply unsatisfying. It was one of those books that, for me, is a page turner as I rip through it, desperate for resolution that ultimately never materializes. The protagonist seems to experience very little to no personal growth. Main plot points fade away to an afterthought and little to no resolution. In fact, I found the whole premise of the book to be supremely difficult to believe. Maybe I’m just naive about the Amazon, but I just could not buy the idea that, in the 21st century, Brazilian and American bureaucratic red tape would be a sufficient reason to not return a foreigner’s remains to their home country and family, especially a person in the Amazon at the behest of a large pharmaceutical company—how were all the other characters just totally accepting of this explanation? And the answer is to send another individual doctor to the site, with virtually no assistance? Sure.

So anyway, this is the whole reason the protagonist is in the Amazon to begin with: she’s trying to find out what happened to her colleague and friend who died while doing the exact same thing she’s doing—checking up on pharmaceutical R&D funded by her employer going on deep in the rainforest with seemingly no end in sight. But once she gets there, this driving motivation to find out what happened to her friend just…disappears. Suddenly finding where he’s buried is just…not that important. Until it reappears again out of nowhere near the end of the book. And the ending—oh that ending. I have a lot of feelings about that, none of them good. It was definitely exciting, gotta give it that much, but it was also just so…out of sync with the rest of the book. And possibly most unsatisfying of all, throughout all of it, I felt as thought the protagonist experienced very little personal growth. Maybe I’m not giving her enough credit, but…it just feels like she did some pretty incredible stuff, just to go back to her life in Minnesota rather…unchanged.

I will say, that what this book -did- do was prompt me to consider more closely the logistics and ethics around pharmaceutical R&D, its funding, and the subsequent use of the drugs and treatments that are a product of that R&D. Admittedly it’s something I’d not really pondered very much, but clearly, this story does get you thinking about some of that.

Content Warnings