Letters from Yellowstone
A Novel
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, and Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Diane Smith’s warmhearted and award-winning epistolary novel about a spunky young woman who joins a makeshift field study in Yellowstone National Park at the end of the nineteenth century
“I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved a book in some time.” —James Welch, author of Fools Crow
In the spring of 1898, A. E. (Alexandria) Bartram—a spirited young woman with a love for botany—is invited to join a field study in Yellowstone National Park. The study’s leader, a mild-mannered professor from Montana, assumes she is a man, and is less than pleased to discover the truth. Once the scientists overcome the shock of having a woman on their team, they forge ahead on a summer of adventure, forming an enlightening web of relationships as they move from Mammoth Hot Springs to a camp high in the backcountry. But as they make their way collecting amid Yellowstone’s beauty, the group is splintered by differing views on science, nature, and economics.
Brimming with humor, excitement, and the romance of the Yellowstone landscape, Letters from Yellowstone is a love letter to the joys of scientific discovery and America’s majestic natural beauty, as well as a thoughtful reflection on environmentalism, Native American displacement, and feminism at the dawn of a new century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the spring of 1898, the Smithsonian Institution organized an expedition for botanical research in Wyoming's Yellowstone Park. First-time novelist Smith, an environmental and science writer, follows amateur botanist A.E. Bartram's summer as the lone woman in that party of male professionals, telling her story through detailed letters (and the occasional Western Union telegram). When Cornell student Bartram arrives in the camp, she receives a cool reception from expedition leader H.G. Merriam, who expected "A.E." to be a man. As the botanists strive to get along and gather flora unique to the Rocky Mountain area, they encounter the U.S. Cavalry and Native Americans. Disturbed by Professor Merriam's inventive, sometimes nonscientific methods, Dr. Philip Aber of the Smithsonian visits the park to inspect and perhaps close down the project. The troubled Dr. Aber finally wanders off unguided into one of Yellowstone's scalding thermal springs; his death adds to the party's web of tensions. As life in Yellowstone changes her, Miss Bartram must deal with her stiff-necked Cornell mentor, Professor Lester King, whose "black-and-white" thinking she finally comes to reject. Miss Bartram lights up the novel with her admirable intelligence, wit and honest desire to learn from everyone, but Smith wisely prevents her epistles from overwhelming the other characters' voices. Instead, the collage of letters and telegrams produces a Rashomon effect--the same actions are viewed from many perspectives with no one narrator dominant. Serenely attentive, deliberately paced, as careful with psychology and history as it is with its botany, Smith's epistolary narrative makes a worthy addition to the expanding category of history-of-science novels. Author tour.
