She says such constant contact - cellphones, texting, e-mailing, tweeting - interferes with plot twists. Sure, the Nashville resident and author is a winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and her books have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages the world over.īut this technology thing, the ever-encroaching creep of communications, keeps making it more difficult for her to keep it out of her novels. Ann Patchett, she of “Bel Canto,” she of her new book, “State of Wonder,” has a technology problem. But my inner literary critic just couldn't let go an enjoy the ride. The fact that she engaged me all the way through the end is definitely worth three stars. and many of the other characters actually seem superfluous.ĭESPITE all these flaws, Patchett won me over with her well crafted sentences and her ability to develop characters that you definitely WANT to learn more about. Swenson, just seems very cold and unfeeling and generally distasteful. The antagonist, a female scientist named Dr. On the literary side, the characters are quite interesting, but other than the protagonist and a young boy, Easter, they are not well developed at all. and that's really too much for the reader to handle.

which I could do for awhile, but eventually the plot points just get piled too high, and the story sort of topples over on itself. Unfortunately, the storyline requires a definite willingness to suspend belief. On the plotting side, Patchett starts out slow (which makes sense given her more literary roots), but ends up at a full fledged gallop by the time Marina gets deep into the Amazon.

In my mind, she didn't fully succeed at either and ended up with a book that was engaging, but ultimately mediocre. So, Patchett is essentially trying to write a crossover book that is both genre (suspense) and literary fiction.

Second, she needs to find out what happened to the employee who was sent earlier to investigate the same situation. First, she must investigate whether a scientist who was hired by the company to develop a new drug is actually doing anything of the sort. The protagonist of this book, Marina, is sent to the Amazon by her company with a two fold mission.

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