The Weeds

November 1, 2022

In contemporary times, a woman from Mississippi conscientiously catalogs plants in the ruins of the Roman Colosseum while looking for meaning in her own life. In 1855, an Englishwoman indentured to botanist Richard Deakin after having been caught stealing also searches the Colosseum for plants, knowing that the woman she loves is far, far away. As with her luscious The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020, Smith parallels time frames to illuminate human desire.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 9, 2023
Smith revisits Rome, the setting of The Everlasting, with another sensuous and sprawling story of the Eternal City. In the 1850s, British botanist Richard Deakin sets about cataloging the flora of the Roman Colosseum. Smith focuses on Deakin’s apprentice, an unnamed woman who is apprehended for burglary and lesbianism and forced by her father to help Deakin. The apprentice’s chapters alternate with present-day entries from the point of view of an unnamed graduate student who is assisting her adviser in replicating Deakin’s study. As the apprentice toils through her sentence, the student rues her lazy and mediocre adviser, a man who says “dumb things” like “Something is always blooming.” The story unfurls, unhurriedly, in the form of an indexed list of vegetation from both narrators in which the entries serve as metaphors for the stifled women’s respective predicaments. Of bitter-cress, for instance, Smith writes: “Picture a plant so sensitive, so f-ing heart-on-its-sleeve, that it built its seeds to explode in a shower of fireworks every time so much as the gentlest thrush wing brushes by.” It’s an ingenious device to connect these resilient characters across time, and to show how women can fall through the cracks and still flourish. There’s not much narrative momentum, but the potent details bring this to vibrant life. Patient readers will enjoy stopping to smell the clematis. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

March 1, 2023
In centuries past, Rome's Colosseum was home to abundant varieties of plant life. This inspired Smith (The Everlasting, 2020) to return to the Eternal City with another novel set in two time frames. She takes a creative approach, organizing her chapters by botanical family, with narrative sections introduced by plant species. Two unnamed young women alternate viewpoints. In 1854, an assistant to Richard Deakin, an English botanist who cataloged the Colosseum's flora, surveys the greenery while recalling her penchant for thievery and missing her female lover, who married a man. In 2018, an American graduate student with an unsupportive advisor is determining which plants from Deakin's book still live at the Colosseum. Through their observant, witty accounts, the protagonists contend with potential romantic partnerships and family pressures while pursuing achievements in male-dominated spaces. Any concern that the structural concept could overshadow the plot is dispelled; in fact, Smith's novel exemplifies the importance of combining science and storytelling. Erudite, playful, and filled with fury about gender inequality, this can be recommended to readers of cli-fi and feminist literary fiction.

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December 1, 2022

In Smith's (The Everlasting) new novel, two women separated by 170 years catalogue the flora at the Roman Colosseum. In 1855, a woman (and a subtle thief) who grieves her former lover (who married a man and is now on her honeymoon) during her apprenticeship to botanist Richard Deakin. She logs over 400 species, using the catalogue of plants as a way to process her loss, then her fear as her father maneuvers her into her own marriage. Deakin publishes her work under his name, though her knowledge of plants eventually brings about his downfall. In modern times, a U.S. Southerner attempts to recreate the catalogue as her fieldwork under her (male) academic advisor, tracking how climate change brings loss to the diversity of the plants at the Colosseum, as her advisor takes credit for her work and fails to help her launch her own independent research. VERDICT This subtle, intelligent work--arranged like a catalogue of plants, complete with sketches--explores how male power and threats like climate change take away agency from women. But it also looks at the small acts of resistance, pushing through like weeds in the cracks, that enable them to survive.--Jennie Mills

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
Two women are roiled by loss and desire. Smith returns to Rome, the setting of her novel The Everlasting (2020), to render, in luminous prose, the lives of two unnamed women, a century apart, grieving, angry, and defiant. Each is engaged in botanical data collection: One, in 1854, assists British botanist Richard Deakin, who aims to record every species of plant growing in the Colosseum. Her father, outraged because she fell in love with a woman, indentured her to Deakin as punishment. In 2018, another woman combs the Colosseum: a graduate student from Mississippi working for a demeaning academic adviser, assigned to compare Deakin's catalog with flora of the present day. Both women are haunted by loss: one, of her lover, who married; the other, of her mother, an amateur naturalist, who died when she was 15. Her mother taught her that plants "meant something. Not just in the doctrine-of-signatures way, or the yellow-rose-for-friendship way," but in a deeply spiritual way. The only proof of beauty, her mother believed, "was a piece of living green pushing through a coffin of spring soil." Smith makes deft use of Deakin's Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, published in 1855, which combined meticulous botanical descriptions with information on each plant's medicinal, culinary, and even literary significance. The women collectors are acutely sensitive to shape, texture, and odor and alert, as well, to plants' cultural connotations and metaphorical richness: "Some plants, like lovers, are parasitical," one collector reflects. "Naming carries bias, or bias worms its way to names." The contemporary collector is enraged by the effects of climate change and rampant tourism on the ecology of the Colosseum. Both women rail against the arrogance and sexism that circumscribe their lives: "What does it take," they ask, "to survive in this world, as a woman, as a weed?" The book is illustrated with delicate drawings by Schermer-Gramm. A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.

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