The Evolution of Jane
   Cathleen Schine
  1998 Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston US
   ISBN: 0395826578


As something to do to get over her divorce Jane sets sails for the Galapagos Islands on a tour, where she finds her erstwhile best friend, rekindles her passion for botany, makes new friends & has an epiphany about her life.

On those distant, arid islands, Jane not only meets up with the descendants of those fabled creatures about which Darwin pondered, made himself ill & wrote for the rest of his life, she finds her cousin with whom she spent a decade of summers.

Jane is a deeply thinking, observant & tolerant adult with clear recall of her childhood years & her parents' way of raising her. Usually tolerant themselves, both of them interesting with an unusual marriage, they were reticent about her cousin & her parents. One of those distant family feuds that kept relatives silent & apart for generations.

Jane is a reader & during her biography stage she read & retained all she could about Darwin & his voyage on the Beagle. We become privy to her memories & her ponderings about evolution & how we think about it.

Fascinating stuff: her musings, putting insights together, mulling over her past, chewing on her future. Still, I couldn't ever see her as clearly as I saw everyone else. Jane does, however, have a droll sense of the absurd & there's a lot of off-kilter, bizarre & risable things to see & do out there in the Pacific.

What a strange book, filled with absorbing details about the person who penned the works that did & still do cause major tectonic shifts in philosophy & belief in our ways of thinking about ourselves, our lives & all living things. I relished gleaning so much about Darwin & the momentous ideas for which he is now an icon.

More from Cathleen Schine: Alice in Bed; To the Birdhouse; Rameau's Niece; The Love Letter
(09/19/99)

Rebecca