Review:: The Garden of Marvels, by Ruth Kassinger

Title: A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work

Author: Ruth Kassinger

Format: Kindle

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Considering the subtitle, I expected to learn a lot from A Garden of Marvels. Instead, I ended up only learning a little, as the bulk of the book (which isn't very long) was anecdotes about Kassinger's gardening and how she came to learn what she's teaching us. In some contexts that could have been done well, but in this instance, I found it tiring.

So why did I pick this book up? Well, it's 2016 and Faranae at Habitica is doing a new URC (which I finished last year, for the record!). One of the tasks involved reading a book about plants. Searching around the San Francisco Public Library's Overdrive, I stumbled upon this one and thought it would be a good idea.

Which it really wasn't. This is less a book about plants as it is a book of Kassinger telling us how she learned about plants. Which, if it were billed that way, could have been a very interesting book. But that's not what I was hoping for, and so was left disappointed.

There's some good stuff in here though; I found the sections on GMO petunias particularly interesting. But again, to get to it I have to slog through a lot of "memoir" type writing, which I just wasn't in the mood for.

tl;dr: remarketed, this could have been a much better book