Blog Tour: The Botanist’s Daughter, by Kayte Nunn

Time to celebrate the magic of plants!

But first, we have to celebrate the magic of this book cover, because I am absolutely in love with it. It is a thing of beauty, and hats off to the design team behind it.

They have some good stuff to work with, though. The Botanist’s Daughter is a lovely little book: sensitive, moving and actually quite unique in its take on historical fiction. It follows two women in two different timelines: Elizabeth, who decides to travel to Chile to discover a rare plant, and Anna, a woman living in Australia who finds a mysterious box when renovating her house, that might prove the key to unlocking Elizabeth’s past…

Though the book starts slowly, Nunn slowly builds up a believable vision of Victorian England. Her passion for plants bleeds off every page- Elizabeth is a botanist and Anna is a gardener- and it really does make the book feel so much richer as a result. Botany is such a fascinating thing to read about, and I loved finding out more about it from both Elizabeth and Anna. Who knew it was such an intricate art?! Not I. (Excuse me while I book my ticket to Kew Gardens…)

The story itself takes us from Cornwall to Chile, from Australia to the UK, and as we fly around the world we find out more about the two characters themselves. You can’t help but root for them: Elizabeth is clearly a woman ahead of her time, and though her romance with a local man is a little disappointing (it feels like her story is unnecessarily truncated) her desire to do the right thing and her warm personality is really lovely to read about.

You also can’t help but draw parallels between her and Anna, the woman in the present day struggling under her own emotional burden and trying to discover more about her potential ancestor. Nunn balances their stories in just the right way, never giving too much away but gradually feeding us information across both timelines that leak into the other person’s story.

The result is a story that feels more rewarding the more you go on. Both women face their own trials and tribulations- Anna is struggling to move on from a traumatic event in her past, while Elizabeth is fending off the attentions of malevolent rival Chigwidden- but by the end you feel as though you’ve gone on a journey with both of them.

Evocative, tender and beautifully written, this globetrotting story is fresh as a spring rose.