Marrow Island

i wanted to like this more because i loved her book, Glaciers. i guess character development and empathy are more important to me that i've realized because i felt this book failed in getting me to feel for any of the characters in the book. i felt removed. maybe i failed the book. while the science in the book was fascinating, i kept finding myself wanting to care more for the characters and to care about what happened. the triumph or fall of human nature felt missing from this novel. it's not a book i will share with the people in my life i share books with. i donated it to the library and yet look forward to reading this author again because i felt her book, Glaciers, revealed her talent as a writer.

This book isn't a thriller or even a page-turner as many of the reviews I've seen suggest. It's actually a bit of a slow burn that's in no rush to reach its eerie climax. I might have been frustrated by the slowness of it if it weren't for Smith's gorgeous writing.Twenty years after a devastating earthquake and an oil refinery explosion leave Marrow Island uninhabitable, Lucie Bowen returns to her once abandoned home to visit her childhood best friend, Katie. As it turns out, Katie and a small colony of radical environmentalists have been living on Marrow Island and remediating the soil to make it safe once again.But there's something strange and perhaps even dangerous about the people in the colony and the practices they've established: to what lengths will they go to reach their ideals?I love moral ambiguity, and there's certainly a lot of that in this novel. Smith's lyrical writing evokes the rawness and the harshness of both nature and human nature, with descriptions that are as beautiful and compelling as they are jarring and haunting. Readers willing to take their time with this book and allow the story to unravel will uncover an understated novel about the choices that we make, the ties that bind us to our past, and our dwindling connection with the natural world.

I will tread lightly so as not to give too much away. As someone who leans towards the radical when it comes to the environment, there was a lot about this book that appealed to me. The main character is a pro-environment journalist capturing stories about those fighting to save us from ourselves. I was also intrigued with the ideas presented for using natural ways to combat man-made disasters. While the book suggests the Marrow Island Colony might be a cult, I wouldn't recommend this to someone looking for that kind of story. Not every commune is a cult. I found the book very compelling until the last maybe third hence the four stars instead of five. Instead of tying up the loose ends, I felt I was left with even more questions. The ending for me was not very satisfying.

Lots of attractive elements here. The San Juan Islands as backdrop to personal and ecological catastrophe. The American communal experiment-this idealistic spark, like most, fails. A cultish leader driven by religious mission. A search for love, a murder, and everywhere beneath their feet the networks of mycelia.The mushrooms win. The possibility of remedial healing of the scars of human activity through fungi is fascinating. The mycelium spreads and sucks in everything, bones, flowers, poisons, transforming it all into a vegetative consciousness. It's in depicting this consciousness lurking just around the next turn in the path where the author succeeds most. She suggests an equivalence between that awareness and human spiritual longing. Maybe she's right.

This book is a journey through the magic of the PNW islands and the power of mushrooms. I highly recommend it.