Summary: Ship Fever is a collection of stories (although the titular story is more of a novella) that revolve around science, particularly science in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the way that the scientific worldview affects the lives of the people who practice it, and the people who come afterward.

"The Behavior of the Hawkweeds" is a story of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and how his disillusionment with science is mirrored by the growing alienation between a professor and his wife. I thought this was an excellent opening story that set the tone for the entire volume quite well: they're stories about science, but they're not about science so much as the people doing to the science, and how that science can echo through time, and affect - or reflect - the lives of the people it touches.

"The English Pupil" focuses on the dying days of Carl Linnaeus, as he reflects over all of the eager young naturalists who died pursuing the passion that he instilled in them. This story was very sad, but also very interesting - I don't think I'd ever learned about Linnaeus's students, or what happened to them - but it's no wonder that Barrett chose them as the subject of a story. Full of pathos, and very, very human.

"The Littoral Zone" is a story of memory and relationships and reconstruction, as a married couple think about the events that took them away from their first marriages and brought them together. It's a story about the tiny threads of regret and sadness that linger even in what we would call a happy life, and the overall tone is almost melancholy. I did love that it was set at the same marine field station where I spent a summer during college, though.

"Rare Bird" is a story of a young woman in the 1760s, interested in science and natural history but kept from their pursuit by her gender. This was easily my favorite story, most likely because I had the easiest time identifying with the protagonist, and of all of the stories, it was the only one that I thought leaned more towards hope than bleakness.

"Soroche" involves a woman cast adrift within a family that doesn't belong to her, and contrasts her lot with Jemmy Button, one of the native Fuegians who was aboard the Beagle with Darwin. As a story, or a character study, this one was excellently crafted and very intriguing. However, I felt like it had to stretch to draw the historical parallels, and so the message of the story wound up feeling more labored than it needed to be.

"Birds with No Feet" is the story of a young naturalist/collector who was working in the Malay Archipelago at the same time as Alfred Russell Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection contemporaneously with Darwin. I liked this story quite a bit, mostly for the glances it gave us of Wallace, who is a fascinating figure, and has been largely - and unfairly - eclipsed by Darwin in the history of science.

"The Marburg Sisters" tells the tale of two estranged sisters returning home to care for their dying father. It's the only story that doesn't particularly involve the history of science, and therefore felt a bit out of place. It was also my least favorite; I didn't particularly care for either Rose or Bianca, and the inconsistent use of the first-person plural bugged me.

"Ship Fever" is set during the typhus epidemic in Canada following the influx of Irish immigrants during the Great Potato Famine. A young and idealistic doctor is called to help at the quarantine station, only to find conditions worse than he expected and deteriorating rapidly, with no guarantee that help is coming, or that the city he calls home will remain unaffected. Harrowing and thoroughly engrossing.

Overall Review and Recommendation: This is the first of Barrett's work I've read, but it won't be the last. Her prose is lovely, striking just the right balance between economy and sparseness, and oftentimes cutting to the bone with a single well-crafted phrase. Her characterization, even in the limited space of a short story, is rich and complex, and she's capable of evoking a surprising amount of emotion in the same short period.

This book probably requires a certain mood to really enjoy - the tone of most of the stories is certainly stark, if not outrightly bleak, and by the time I finished it, I felt like I'd made several passes through the emotional wringer. Still, each of the stories, even the short ones, had a certain heft, a certain gravity to it, and in sum, they added up to a thoroughly compelling read. 4 out of 5 stars. ( )

There was something about Barrett’s writing style that drew me into the stories, which prevented me from putting the book down. I only stopped, because I was two tired to finish reading it. Barrett has a beautiful style of writing, that will pull the reader in, and it won’t release you until you stop. She has a great ability to etch the emotions of the characters into the pages of the books, to illustrate what they felt and went through at the time, without actually saying it. This is especially seen in “Ship Fever” and “The English Pupil”, which were my two favourite stories from the collection. Emotion from these two stories just pours out of the pages, and the characters seem to stay with you after you leave them. Barrett also has a great ability to describe the setting, making the reader feel as if they are an invisible body, watching the story play out, but she does with ease and very short descriptions, I’m not sure how to explain it. Her writing just has this effect on the reader and it pulls them into the stories, without the reader even realizing it.

One of the things I disliked was that there were one or two stories I didn’t really care much for particularly, “The Littoral Zone.” The writing was the same, but the plot of the story itself, just didn’t interest me or reach me in anyway.

Overall, this was a fantastic read, drawing the reader in to the stories, and the summary in the book can’t explain it better “these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space.” Which of course is what I think draws the reading in so well, the author’s ability to create such realism and emotion in the stories.

Review also on my blog: http://juliebooks.blogspot.com/2008/1... ( )

best and most lasting book of short stories I have ever read ( )

Barrett does not disappoint in this collection of short stories. My favorite was the title story which was actually a novella and told the story of Dr. Lauchlin Grant and the Irish emigrants forced to stay at an island outside of Montreal because they are sick with typhus. Because of the conditions on the ship (wretched) it is called "ship fever." Dr. Grant's relationship with his best friend's wife, Suzannah, and an impoverished Irish girl that he saves, provide the human story here and, as with all Barrett's work, the science is a main character. Throughout the stories, reference is made to characters from Barrett's other books and it was interesting to make the connections. Great read! ( )

I am enjoying this book of short stories wholeheartedly. Who would have thought that stories with real scientists as the characters could be so interesting and beautiful. The first story, about Mendel hooked me. I did my grad research on peas (a breeding project also) and could picture the flowers and the populations of peas grown in patches and near walls. Thoroughly liked the characters. The story with Linneaus as an old man was stunningly crisp. Yes, it's a very good book of short stories. ( )