Eat, Pray, Love, Evolve
She is not your typical girl-next-door type. She is tall, fat and sports a face that oozes masculinity.
But she is also the daughter of a multimillionaire, has more knowledge in her head than 20 men put together, can confidently engage great scientists and thinkers in debate, and without even looking, name all the flowers and plants in a field.
Above all, Alma Whittaker is brave, resolute, resourceful and yet also vulnerable – which is precisely why you immediately fall in love with her.
Set in the 1800s, Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel tracks the life of Alma from the moment she is born into the Whittaker clan, one of the wealthiest in Philadelphia.
The only daughter of formidable tycoon Henry Whittaker, who made his fortune through sheer resolve and intelligence, and Beatrix Whittaker, an intelligent Dutch woman, Alma is born into privilege.
But things take an about-turn for Alma when Prudence, a girl her age, is saved from a tragedy and adopted into the Whittaker family.
Unlike Alma, Prudence is pretty and dainty.
Yet a semblance of sisterhood is forged between the girls, and Alma continues to excel in her studies, eventually becoming a well-known botanist and science writer. She ends up marrying Ambrose Pike, a man who can draw orchids with surgical precision and is engrossed in the spiritual – a foreign “field” for Alma . When her marriage falls apart, she travels to Tahiti, where she develops her “Theory of Competitive Alteration”, believing it to be the equal of Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species”.
“The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive.”
Evolution is the book’s thematic DNA but what rivets the reader to its pages are beautifully drawn characters and an absorbing tale that transports you back to a fully-fledged Victorian world that satisfies with gorgeous description and plenty of detail drawn from real history.
The Signature of All Things
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Published by Bloomsbury
Available at good bookshops, Bt964 (hardcover)
Reviewed by Dinesh Kumar Maganathan
