The Signature of All Things

     What a wonder is The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, lush, verdant and efflorescent like the plants that fill its pages. You can’t help but get pulled in and up by the narrative in the way all living things reach for the sun. The characters are robust and noteworthy, from the daring, adventuresome and iron-willed Henry Whittaker, whose personality is as extreme as the some of the climates in which grow his favorite botanicals, and who endures much at great personal cost to rise above his very lowly beginnings, to his brilliant and stoic wife, Beatrice, who leaves her Dutch family to move to the United States with Henry and make their mark on the world, to their only natural offspring, Alma, as strong-willed as her father, and erudite as her mother.    Read the review here…