Field Guide: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Extremely well-written first novel...
Review: Graduate student Annabel Mendelssohn is on a research trip to Australia where she plans to study the habits of bats. Once ensconced in the area with her fellow researchers, however, her life takes a daring turn. She takes an interest in her lead professor, John Goode, who mysteriously disappears in the midst of Annabel's research. As she decides to embark on a search mission of her own, she meets and falls in love with Goode's son, who is also searching for Goode. The novel is slightly sluggish though well written and therefore I give it three stars.

Rating:
Summary: Women in Science: It's a hit with me!
Review: The story woven by Gwendolen Gross in Field Guide is extremely satisfying. Please, read other reviews and the book's summary to learn more about the story itself. It is the satisfaction of reading a book about a woman in science that most attracts me.

Annabel, the main character, is a woman of honor in the scientific field. Gross gives Annabel great field skills, courage, energy and dedication. I thoroughly enjoyed enduring the Australian forests, feeling the mistaken hand on a snake, smelling the bat guano...

Gross gives credibility to women in science, yet does not make them single-minded creatures of study. Annabel deals with the death of a family member that haunts her studies, attractions to others, and even some romance, yet she maintains herself as a reliable and steadfast scientist, too.

Brava!

Rating:
Summary: not enough slogging in the outback
Review: This is a cerebrally-rich novel delving into the mindset of a young female grad student researching spectacled fruit bats in Australia. For those interesting in detailed experiences slogging it out in the outbush, you may be disappointed. A minimum of scientific data presents in the story content, and even less of the bountiful data of the Australian outback. Instead, this novel appears to focus on the feelings of a young woman coming to grips of the mysterious death of an older brother, missing her older sister, coping with prissy room mate grad students and managing her lust for her intriguing professor, John Goode.

In the course of all this mind slush, is the curve ball. John Goode, the typical absent minded type professor goes missing. This is nothing unusual for him, he is quirky, often takes off for over-lingering research jaunts and is also suffering remorse as a result of an affair recently committed which has decimated his family.

The elder son, Leon travels back home to Australia from America to search for his father. In the course of the investigation, he meets Annabel, a name he was given that could shed some light on his father's disappearance. The inevitable attraction occurs while the search for answers continues. The formula for a ripping novel was there, but it just didn't get off the guano.