The Nature of Things

The Seed Collectors: A Novel by Scarlett Thomas My rating: 3 of 5 stars How do I even begin to try to sum up this book? First of all, it seems impossible to categorize, and if I can't easily fit it into one of my "reading boxes," how can I analyze my experience with it? It is literary fiction, but at some point, it slops over into mysticism and fantasy. It seems a bit like a cross between Kate Atkinson and Paulo Coelho. In the last third of the book, it is more Coelho than Atkinson and it sort of lost me there. This is the story of a family. A dysfunctional family - but then aren't all families dysfunctional to some degree? This one, however, is dysfunctional to the nth degree. This is the Gardener family. We meet the fourth and fifth generations of the clan descended from an English botanist and his Indian wife. The family tradition is that all children who do not carry the family name of Gardener will be named in honor of plants. Thus, we have Fleur, Plum, Ash, Bry...