2022/70: State of Wonder -- Ann Patchett

2022/70: State of Wonder -- Ann Patchett

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. [p. 43]

It's over twenty years since I read The Magician's Assistant, and State of Wonder has had, I think, a similar effect on me: a kind of euphoria, a sense that something unreal, or differently real, is hiding beneath the surface of the novel.

State of Wonder opens with pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh learning of the death of her research partner Anders Eckman.( Read more... )