Somebody did the reading

The botany in this is better than the botany in almost any novel I've read, and I've gone looking. Nathan's garden tells you everything the sermons keep failing to: he plants his Georgia seeds in Congolese ground, they come up beautifully, they flower, and nothing fruits, because there is nothing there to pollinate them. That is correct, it is specific, and it is structural rather than decorative. Somebody did the reading. The manioc details are right too, processing included, which people get wrong constantly and then repeat at each other.

The poisonwood itself I have never met in the field and can't vouch for, though the description of the sap reaction is plausible enough that I went and looked it up and then lost two hours to Metopium.

The novel around all of that is more uneven. Rachel is a caricature who earns her keep, Adah is the best thing in it by some distance, and Leah's arc in the last quarter turns into a history lecture with a wedding attached. It is too long by a good stretch and the ending keeps announcing that it is about to arrive. I also lost patience with Orleanna's chapter openings, which are written in a register the rest of the book then has to keep apologising for.

Seven, and it is the garden that earns it. There is a receipt in mine from a bookshop in Nairobi that closed years ago, which is not relevant to anything, but there it is.