Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I can't be the only reader completely astonished by the gushing reviews for this book. The lead character, Marina, is frustratingly, irritatingly passive. If you really examine her scenes she almost never makes full statements, while other people talk in long long passages at her. She does things because people tell her to, she has no spine until the last moments. She is haunted by nightmares that add nothing to the story. On top of all that, the natives (named, I learned on NPR, after Patchett's favorite breakfast cereal) are not humanized at all. We don't get to know any one of them -- not a one -- as a real human being. Basing them on a breakfast cereal is almost offensive. Lastly, the medical aspect of this is just absurd. Chewing on trees?! Really?? And if this wasn't enough, Patchett has added a further discovery besides life-long fertility, an anti-malarial component, that results from all the bark-chewing. How many miraculously implausible medical discoveries can one book take? The ending is bewildering, giving us no clue as to what to make of Marina by the end. Did Patchett mean this story to be comic? (She speaks often in interviews of thinking herself funny, although no one seems to get her humor.) A very frustrating read, perhaps more satisfying to critics than to a regular reader.