Watermark Books and Cafe

"State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett (Harper, ISBN 9780062049803, $26.99) 

“State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s sixth novel, is her best. "State of Wonder" is set in the exotic locale of Brazil’s Amazon River and jungle where it pits the natural healing powers of the human body against the intervention of conventional medicine, and the practices of indigenous cultures against pharmaceutical researchers.  

Marina Singh, troubled by a botched medical procedure she performed as a resident, changes her focus of study from medicine to pharmacology. Years later, she and her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, are working for the same company, Vogel, a large pharmaceutical lab. The resolute and icy Swenson is the leader of the research team studying a tribe of people whose women conceive and bear children into their 70s, but she has no intention of “reporting” on her research until her report is conclusive. Science cannot be made to perform to a schedule. Imagine the possibilities for a drug that could extend fertility for women whose childbirth time has come and gone. Marina is sent to the Amazon jungle to get a status report on an intentionally isolated research lab of her colleague Anders Eckman after receiving word of his death, allegedly from a deadly fever, where she must also  face the woman she once emulated and feared.      

Patchett does an amazing job of contrasting the cultures of life in the developed world with life in an isolated tribe that has no measure of time or access to the outside world. Once Marina has infiltrated the lab and tribe, the intention of her trip fades and survival in a primitive environment thick with disease and bugs and strife is paramount.   

Ann Patchett’s sagacious prose perfectly complements a plot full of as many twists and turns as the Amazon tributaries in which it is set. This is sure to be one of the best books of the summer.  

Review by Sarah Bagby