Publishers Weekly
07/25/2022
National Book Award winner Barrett (Ship Fever) offers a finely crafted linked collection about memory and science. “Wonders of the Shore,” named after a fictional 1889 study of marine life by Daphne Bannister, introduces the close and longtime friendship between Daphne and Henrietta Atkins, a lepidopterist and schoolteacher in Central New York. In the brilliant and complex “The Regimental History,” 10-year-old Henrietta takes dictation for a family whose two sons enlisted in the Union Army and catalogs the sons’ letters. The story ends more than a quarter century later with a meeting between Henrietta and the soldiers’ nephew with an amateur historian, in which Henrietta’s sharp memory yields striking revelations. The highlight, “The Accident,” features Henrietta’s niece Caroline, whose account of a life-changing aviation disaster Daphne retells after meeting Caroline at an air show in 1922. In the lengthy title story, which becomes a bit diffuse with its dizzying blending of family trees, old friends Dierdre Banks and Rose Marburg, a descendent of Henrietta, attend an annual retreat of biologists in the Adirondacks in 2018. Still, Barrett offers well-observed details of the region, and Dierdre and Rose’s imbalanced friendship makes for an intriguing parallel to Henrietta and Daphne, as Rose is now a schoolteacher after showing early promise while Dierdre is a star biologist. This offers rich rewards. (Sept.)
Christian Science Monitor
"Andrea Barrett’s rewarding short story collection spans the Civil War era to the present day. Women’s roles evolve, as succeeding generations explore science, writing, teaching, and even flying, while still finding room for love and community."
"[A] confident, quiet, richly imagined collection…Barrett is bold yet deft in handling timelines, lifetimes, and points of view. Each individual story feels complete, even as the connections between them…reinforce the collection’s central conviction that there is no such thing in nature as self-containment; everything is part of something bigger than itself."
Wall Street Journal - Christoph Irmscher
"An imaginative miracle woven of complexly connected stories…Immersing oneself in Natural History is an experience both bracing and magical… [T]he blurring of distinctions, of past and present, reality and fiction, is enhanced by a narrative consciousness that doesn’t hover over the characters so much as live in between them, switching at will from one perspective to the next, allowing us to see the world through Henrietta’s eyes as well as look at her the way others do."
San Francisco Chronicle - L.A. Taggart
"Each story here offers [Barrett's] signature gifts: lyrical distillation of scientific complexity, artful wonder at the natural world, exquisitely observed details, and prose as precise and inevitable as a mathematical proof…With their kaleidoscopic interconnectedness, the overlapping circles of Barrett's stories, from this collection as well as her earlier works, add up to something large and delightful."
Booklist (starred review)
"Barrett transforms deep knowledge of history, science, and human nature into gorgeously vital and insightful stories in which every element is richly brewed, mulled, and redolent."
Star Tribune - Connie Ogle
"[E]xhibits a shrewd understanding of the fragility and resilience of the human heart and how that intersects with our bold dreams of discovery, scientific or otherwise…Barrett revisits her themes with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s grace."
Chicago Tribune
"The elegant linked-story collection Natural History returns the National Book Award-winner to familiar characters—drawn to natural wonders, searching for their own place in science—from her celebrated Ship Fever."
Ploughshares - Holly M. Wendt
"Telling the untold story is the heart of Natural History…The two stories merge, a kind of palimpsest in which the past is visible through the present and then shaded, artfully, by another hand. The effect is at once familiar and fresh, like being reminded of something half-forgotten and all the more treasured in the recollection, which has been the enduring feeling of all of these stories Andrea Barrett has written, across all these years."
Bookpage (starred review)
"You need not have read earlier stories to be informed and dazzled by Natural History…Barrett demonstrates that while history organizes and distills events, fiction brings messy humanity gloriously to life."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"[A] beautiful new collection."
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Exhibits a shrewd understanding of the fragility and resilience of the human heart and how that intersects with our bold dreams of discovery, scientific or otherwise.”
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-06-08
Henrietta Atkins and one Marburg sister return from Ship Fever (1996), Barrett’s National Book Award winner, in interlinked stories ranging across half a century.
Henrietta occupies center stage in the first three stories. “Wonders of the Shore” takes her to an island off the New Hampshire coast for an 1885 summer vacation with her friend Daphne. Barrett delicately contrasts Henrietta’s life as a high school biology teacher in Crooked Lake, her central New York hometown, with Daphne’s profitable career as a science writer and pseudonymous cookbook author; she plumbs the women’s complex relationship and provides a surprise ending that reveals Henrietta making an unexpected decision about herself and her future. In “The Regimental History,” she is a bright, inquisitive 10-year-old fascinated by the letters of a Union soldier, later learning of the soldier’s sad decline from his nephew, who’s one of her students. In fewer than 50 pages, Barrett considers the cost of war, the duplicity of leaders, and the nurturing bond between a young person and an inspired teacher. “Henrietta and Her Moths” also ranges through time to trace Henrietta’s efforts to help her sister, Hester, through pregnancy and motherhood and to provide a vivid glimpse of Henrietta’s ability to convey the excitement of scientific observation to her charges, including Caroline, her tempestuous niece. Caroline has become an aviator in “The Accident,” which captures both the joy of flight and the cruelty of class privilege with Barrett’s characteristic subtlety and cleareyed compassion. In “Open House,” another of Henrietta’s students faces a conflict that underpins the entire collection: The bonds that tie people to family and community are challenged by the ambition to find a place in the larger world. That theme becomes explicit in the title story, which finds Rose Marburg in 2018 reflecting on her choice to abandon scientific work that led others to a Nobel Prize. As always, Barrett depicts the natural world and the human heart with wonder, tenderness, and deep understanding.
More superb work from an American master.
