SOURCE: “Missing the Boat,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 10, 1999, p. 21.

In the following negative review, Hines notes that Barrett is a skilled writer, but faults the stories in Ship Fever for lacking emotional power and depth.

In a recent interview, Andrea Barrett said she thought she had been born in the wrong century—that she would have been a better nineteenth-century naturalist than the biologist she was trained as; and certainly the omnivorous passions of the naturalist/collector inform and drive this collection of eight short stories Ship Fever which won this year's American National Book Award. In each tale, the characters' relationship with science differs; in some, they pose in the foreground against it; while in others, notably “Birds with No Feet,” science itself seems to be the protagonist, conducting an experiment using human ingredients.

In “The Behaviour of the Hawkweeds,” a woman lures a biologist into...