Attached is the description for this novel as I could not think of how to describe this novel. It's a rather odd book and not at all as I had imagined but I liked to too.

1867, Philadelphia. Amateur naturalist Walter Ash is on the brink of setting off to travel up his beloved Amazon when fate intervenes, obliging his only son to take his place. More at ease among his books than in the field, Paul Ash takes a reluctant leave of absence from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to accompany his grieving stepmother and her young companion to the fabled River Sea. Paul holds no memory of the place, though he was born there; he was still an infant when his father carried him out of the jungle and away from the mixed-blood family he might have known. As it transpires, however, neither the region nor its people have forgotten Paul. The Amazon lays claim to him in no uncertain terms, but it also works a peculiar magic on both his father's lovely widow and her friend--a quiet little Quaker named Rachel Weaver who proves strangely at home in the wild. ( )

A novel in which girls and women are given strong and successful roles, there may be a bit of unlikely maturity and competence in all females concerned, but this is a book in which the males and females are equally respected and "given good press." A seven-year-old girl who acts like a mother and protectress, a main character young woman who supports her mistress like a slave with never a resentful thought ... just seems a bit 'pat.' And that's my only slight criticism. Males, by contrast, are gentle and kind but clumsy--one dies by a ridiculous misadventure; another incapacitates himself, leaving the women to shine on their own, by hurting his foot. This is a very pleasant read indeed and one that gives the reader a warm glow for the biological depth of the world, for the potential beauty in human relations, and a bit of ruefulness for what seems to be a vanishing world. The Amazon is being attacked on all sides today, coral reefs bleaching out, songbirds beset and dying off... so it's a great pleasure to read of trips into the past (diary of Walter) and into a world that seemed incapable of ever being depleted. Inspired by the novel Badlands by Robert Kroetsch, there are many similarities to that novel in the collection of species for zoos and museums or personal displays, in the quest for one's roots and parents, and in the location of one never-met parent in the hegemonised or penetrated culture. But much as I loved Badlands, which I read just prior to asking the library to order in The Naturalist, I enjoyed the exoticism of the latter more, and the storytelling from the revolving POVs of a male and a female. Another feature I enjoyed was the sketching/ painting of one character (also paralleled by the photographer, a smaller character in The Badlands); something about the leisure-class luxury of Iris helped lend a lazy-hazy feeling to the progress of the boat into the heart of the Amazon. Another clear influence I find in the book is VS Naipaul; specifically, the 1844-set section (p. 81) in the Parà custom-house seems lifted right out of Naipaul's frustrations in An Area of Darkness (nonfiction). ( )