Archangel: Fiction

There are always good stories in a Barrett collection, although this one isn't, in my opinion, nearly as engaging as Servants of the Map or Voyage of the Narwhal. I do love how Barrett incorporates science (& women as scientists/ citizen scientists) into her stories. My favorites here are The Island & The Ether of Space.

I feel I should like Andrea Barrett's stories better than I do because we have a lot in common. We are about the same age, and were both science majors who also loved literature. And I do like many of her stories, which generally focus on people engaged in scientific activities of various sorts, but I don't usually find myself fully engaged by them.

One of the things I liked about this latest collection of five stories is the way the characters recur in different situations in different stories. For example, in the first story alone, an astronomer mentioned in passing is the protagonist of the second story, a secondary character is the protagonist of the third story, and the protagonist, aged 12, reappears as a young soldier in the last show more story where he encounters airplanes, which he first saw on an exciting successful test of flight as a child in the first story, used instead as weapons of war. The reappearance of characters made me, as a reader, feel I knew them better and made the stories deeper.

Barret tries to interweave the science with the story, and the scientific activity often seems to parallel the personal story as when, in the last story, a volunteer x-ray technician, in the little known extension of World War I when allied forces intervened in the Russian civil war, can understand how x-rays work and interpret what they show inside bodies, but can't seem to understand the human motivations of the people around her. Or as when, in another story, a young teaching school graduate at a summer field natural history course led by an admired and famous scientist who has become a leading critic of Darwin realizes the validity of the Darwinian theory as she recognizes that her teacher is not the hero she thought he was.

What I'm trying to say is that sometimes Barrett tries too hard to show the analogies. And sometimes the science seems a little too educational and not sufficiently integrated into the stories. But, other times, in a delicate way, Barrett vividly portrays what it means to be a scientist while also showing an understanding of human behavior: the science and the characters click and the stories are moving. I really enjoyed several of them, while one or two left me cold. show less

A collection of five stories by Andrea Barrett. Like those in her other collections, these all take natural history/science as their focal point, and are placed at a wide variety of time periods and settings (with some threads that carry through). While I didn't find this collection quite as good as some of her earlier volumes, each story is still beautifully written and the volume as a whole works very well.

I liked this, for the most part, with the caveat that I'm a sucker for Enlightenment-era science stories. There were only five to the whole book, and some worked better than others—I felt her research peeking through fairly regularly, and some of the narrative seemed like more of an armature to hang the science on than anything propelling the story, except in a very abstract way. Still, her writing is lovely, and it all managed to hang together pretty well.

Beautifully written though some of her research shows a bit too much - a barrage of scientific details don't help with the pace. But I liked the title story set in Russia just after WWI and The Island, a story about Louis Agassiz and the precursor to the school at Wood's Hole. I would give those an extra half star.

Late 1800's and near the turn of the new century and scientific investigation and many inventions are at the forefront of this novel of short stories.

Loved the first story and twelve yr. old Constatine Boyd, who leaves his home to spend summers with his uncles. In 1908 the uncle he is sent to is in a village that has many investigators and inventors, experiments, first efforts at flight and many other things. What makes this story for me is Constatine's enthusiasm, he looks at everything with such a sense of wonder. The reason he spends summers with his uncles is also poignantly revealed.

The second story I was not drawn into, but the other three were very good. Two of the stories included young women trying to convince people that show more they belong in the world of science, that they can have a place. The last story. the title story, I again loved because it ends as it started with Constatine. Of course he is grown up now.

So science and character studies in a well written book. Really enjoy her writing. show less

Five connected stories set in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, each about a character who is discovering new ways to think about science and the investigation of the natural world. Wonderful.