The Evolution of Jane - ISBNLookup.com

From the Publisher

"Crackles with energy, wit and laughter . . . Schine is a great speculator in the commodities of life, a life-scientist hypothesizing madly. She's written a novel that makes feeling good feel like a good thing." Boston Globe

"Schine renders her story with such deftness and humor that the reader can't help but be enchanted . . . A delightful exercise in literary wit, a perfect summer screwball comedy." The New York Times

"A sensual treat . . . Light as a souffle, rich as a sundae, and as satisfying as love." The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Letter perfect . . . An affair to remember, a book you won't forget. Grade: A." Entertainment Weekly

Mademoiselle

Childhood memories, anger, curiosity, and love resurface as Jane spends the rest of her trip — and Schine, the rest of this clever novel — contemplating evolution, wildlife and the mysteries of friendship. Equal parts fascinating science lesson and love story.

New Yorker

'First Martha and I were one, now we were two,' Jane Barlow Schwartz, Schine's wry narrator, woefully tells us. For Jane, the loss of her cousin and childhood best friend was far more troubling than her later divorce from a badly chosen husband. When she and Martha are unexpectedly reunited on a cruise around the Galapagos Islands, Jane struggles to identify the 'splitting event' that drove them apart, and in the process she uncovers a welter of family secrets and on-board antics. The intricacies of Darwinian evolution and natural history provide excellent fodder for Schine's comic sensibility, but her inquiry into girlhood friendship never quite attains the introspective power afforded by its premise.

Elle

Deftly embroidered with a cast of oddball characters whom even Darwin would have considered one of a kind, Schine's novel is both playful and smart.

Richard Eder

Very funny, very smart...In The Evolution of Jane, thinking heals the heart or at least foritifies it as it heals itself. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jill Smolowe

. . .[B]oth a humorous meditation on friendship and a clever send-up of the hypereducated class. . . .idiosyncratic characters; memorably wry and intelligent observations; brisk, witty writing. —People

From The Critics

Schine has written several successful, comically affectionate investigations into the human heart. This is not one of them.
Jane is on a nature tour of the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin developed his theory of evolution, to "recover" from her divorceeven though, she states unequivocally, the divorce was far less stressful to her psyche than the memory of being inexplicably rejected by her cousin and best friend, Martha, in high school.
When Martha turns up as the tour guide on Jane's trip, Jane becomes obsessed with trying to find an explanation for the breach of friendship, ultimately turning to Darwin's evolutionary theories. Schine gets points for effort, but unfortunately the results are ridiculous.
"And so, as I mulled over the problem of species, I recognized that there existed between the origins of life and Martha Barlow an important link: the confusion experienced by Jane Barlow Schwartz. This link was extremely suggestive. It seemed to promise some related solution. If A = (?) and B = (?), then all one has to prove is (?). It was obvious. The mechanism that explained the transmutation of species would explain Martha's transmutation, the transmutation of friendship."
Puh-lease.
Read Schine's last novel, The Love Letter, instead.
Nan Goldberg

Library Journal

A best friend is a terrible thing to lose, especially in Schine's quirky world. Twenty-four-year-old Jane Barlow Schwartz is widely consoled when her husband walks out after six months of marriage, but she is more bereft about the end of her relationship with distant cousin and best friend Martha Barlow years earlier. A diverting trip to the Galapagos Islands for longtime Darwin fan Jane -- who's long wondered about how to distinguish a species -- only ratchets up her vexations, for the tour guide is none other than Martha. Schine plays it all like a fine instrument: Jane's musings about evolution and friendship, the Jane-Martha interaction and the whispered-about Barlow family feud, the camaraderie among the disparate tour members, and descriptions of the islands and their flora and fauna. Thought-provoking and amusing, this is a literary treat. -- Michele Leber, Fairfax County Public Library, Virginia

Jill Smolowe

Barbara Kingsolver

. . .[A] reverse allegory in which the large, real-world principles of natural selection and speciation are used to shet light ont he small particualars of a character's life. . . .the writing is fine and the plot gambols along enjoyable to its conclusion. . . .Cathleen Schine. . .makes chaos theory and speciation sound like fun. -- New York Times Book Review

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

. . .Ms. Schine very nearly pulls off a tour de force in which friendship comes to stand for the possibility of transcending natural selection. . . .But a degree of strain becomes evident when events are made to illustrate the novel's ideas. . . .The Evolution of Jane remains a great pleasure to read. -- The New York Times

The New Yorker

Mademoiselle

Childhood memories, anger, curiosity, and love resurface as Jane spends the rest of her trip -- and Schine, the rest of this clever novel -- contemplating evolution, wildlife and the mysteries of friendship. Equal parts fascinating science lesson and love story.

Kirkus Reviews

Schine's fifth novel (after the bestselling The Love Letter) again focuses on quiet revelations and the slow process of discovering what matters—as, here, a meek young woman on the rebound from a disastrous marriage escapes to the Galapagos Islands, only to run into her best friend from childhood. While a Galapagos tour might seem an unlikely choice for a woman in distress, Jane doesn't think twice when her mother suggests she go to forget her troubles. She outfits herself for every contingency—except one, which she encounters immediately on arrival: her long-lost cousin Martha, now her tour group's guide. As Martha shows them the natural marvels that set Darwin thinking along evolutionary lines, Jane ponders the evolution of her own life after the abrupt, unexplained exit of her cousin, who'd been her next-door neighbor and closest friend into adolescence. Not willing to broach the subject to Martha, but convinced that the traumatic separation was somehow her fault, Jane speculates endlessly as to the cause, and so relives a tortured family history complete with living in a town named for her ancestor, a mysterious feud that left her parents refusing to speak to Martha's parents, and an earthy great-aunt who in her declining years came to live with the family—and who later accidentally set fire to their house. Struggle as she might to stay focused on the trip at hand, Jane alternates her musings on speciation with these blasts from the past, and when a mild flirtation with a tour member seems threatened by Martha, she has an emotional, and physical, meltdown. Eventually, however, she realizes she doesn't have to blame herself for long-ago breach—and withthat insight comes new information about the family's darker secrets. In spite of genteel trappings and an exotic locale, which serves as little more than a painted backdrop: a penetrating, smooth, and often clever portrait of a woman finding herself.