Nothing signals spring in the South quite like the profusion of bright green, flowering plants sprouting up in lawns, lots, and highway medians, seemingly overnight—a tapestry of chickweed, cleavers, henbit, false garlic, wild violets, and crimson clover. Those few weeks of spring weeds, before the evil mowers crank into gear, are my favorite weeks of spring. What a perfect time, then, to read Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds, a celebration of plant life and survival, told through the eyes of two women documenting the flora of the Roman Colosseum—centuries apart. As Katy writes, “women and unwanted plants have an uncomfortable amount in common.”
Named a best book of the year at The New Yorker and a must read at The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Millions, and Garden & Gun, the novel borrows its structure from botanist Richard Deakin’s 1855 Flora of Colosseum, a catalog of the 420 plants he found growing in the Roman ruins. The Weeds, too, has 420 entries that form a fully fleshed out narrative arc and a conversation held between two women of two different times…and occasionally, a ghost.
Lucky for us, Katy will be joining us to talk about her beautiful and compulsively readable novel on Thursday, March 21 at 6 p.m. CDT. You can order a copy of The Weeds from our partners—Lemuria Books and Friendly City Books—or purchase a book through our affiliate Bookshop link.
Here is the official description of the book:
In Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds, two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires.
A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, signed up to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.
In 1854, a woman pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. She is a thief, and she must find new ways to use her hands. If only the woman she loves weren’t on a boat, with a husband. But love isn’t always possible. She logs 420 species.
Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses—medical, agricultural, culinary—these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women’s lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?
Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.
About the author:
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a Vogue best book of the year; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times best historical fiction book of the year. She is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub, among other publications. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.
The Rooted Book Club is in partnership with the Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and Friendly City Books. Red Squared records and produces our book club conversations at their podcast studio in The Hangar in Midtown, Jackson. Reach out or leave a comment with any questions, suggestions, or comments. Happy reading!