Melanie WallaceReseñas

I suggest you read this as soon as it is released!

I received this book free from the publisher via netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

Please see my full reviews available at www.coffeeandtrainspotting.com.

I'm not quite sure how to rate this one. I started it as an audio book on hoopla but it returned before I had a chance to finish so I bought the ebook and that was a mistake. I was really enjoying it up until the physical copy. Why would an author not use quotation marks for dialogue? It made me so mad. 3 ⭐️ overall since I enjoyed the story but why? Why ruin a good thing?

Having read Wallace's new book, The Girl in the Garden, I went looking for other books and found this one. IF I had read it first I would NEVER have gone NEAR her newer book. I found this book just plain grizzly!! Although I am totally impressed with Wallace's ability to provide absolutely vivid descriptions of the wilderness, it is a truly horrific story and I was very sorry I kept reading it, hoping that it was somehow going to turn out in the end to be worth the effort---it was not!

Although I usually stop reading a book where the author refuses o use quotation marks but I swallowed and kept reading....and I loved this book. I DO want more---an epilogue would be lovely.

During the mid-seventies, a group of lonely individuals is brought together to help June, a young girl and her infant son, Luke. The mother and child had been abandoned at a motel run by Mabel who is grieving the loss of her husband. She convinces her friend Iris, who has been a recluse since the death of her own husband many years ago, to allow the pair to stay in a small cottage on her property. Iris takes them in reluctantly, turning their care over to Duncan, her lawyer, who, in turn, introduces them to Oldman, a kind older bachelor, who takes them under his wing.

A few years later, Iris is terminally ill and her daughter, Claire, from who she has been estranged since her husband’s death, convinces Sam, a Vietnam vet severely wounded both physically and mentally, to drive her to visit with her mother, to help but also to learn about her father and why her mother abandoned her, like June, to the care of Duncan and Oldman when she was a teenager.

In The Girl In the Garden, author Melanie Wallace, has created a beautifully written, quiet, and moving story about abandonment, loss, grief, and ultimately redemption; how dysfunction and secrets within families can damage and how a community of strangers can come together to provide the emotional and physical shelter needed to heal.

Thanks to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

A special thank you to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The characters in this novel are isolated either by circumstance or by choice and yet they are all connected. June is abandoned with Luke, her infant son at Mabel's seaside motel and it is her arrival that is the ripple effect for the story. Mabel, a widower, is grieving for her husband, and takes on helping June and her son. From here we meet Iris, a reclusive woman who is living out her days of humiliation at the hands of her husband; Iris' daughter Claire, a fiercely independent photographer; Sam, a disfigured war vet; Oldman, a wise older gentleman; Duncan, a trusted guardian.

Wallace's novel is a slow burn when revealing how these individual stories are related to one another. Each character is drawn out over the course of the narrative through June and Luke, who is an extension of June. They help not only bring Iris out of her shell, but are a link to what is good in the world. Told from multiple points of view, this beautiful novel would be an excellent choice for a book club.

Incredibly depressing. I generally do not mind traumatic when the story supports it but this was bleak. Some will love it but I just could not wait for it to end so I could return my borrowed copy.

It’s the end of summer, and Mabel is about to shutter her guest cabins when a car drives up. Out come a teen aged girl with a tiny baby, and an angry, tired man who completely ignores them. Mabel rents them a cabin for a few days; she isn’t surprised when one day the man drives off and doesn’t come back. She allows the girl to stay on, then finds them a place to stay for the winter, in a cottage behind the house of a friend of hers, Iris. Iris wants no rent- in fact, she’ll give the girl money- she just wants a few chores done and she gets to spend a couple of hours a day with the baby.

Three years later, June and Luke are still living in the cottage. She’s made a couple of friends, and has created a life for herself, working for Iris as Iris gradually declines. She’s formed relationships with others in the small town. It’s a pretty decent life, if strictly circumscribed.

Then Iris’s daughter, Claire, returns. Not only has she been gone for years with no contact, but she moved out of the main house at 13 and lived in the cottage until she was 18 and could leave. During her teen years she was basically brought up by Duncan, a local lawyer, who signed her absence slips, took her to the doctor, and attended parent-teacher meetings- Iris was happy to turn over the raising of her child. She’s now a photojournalist- largely taught by Oldman, a photographer during WW 2- who has won awards and created a life that has nothing to do with the place she grew up in. Claire brings with her, as her driver, a badly battle scarred Viet Nam vet named Sam, a man who works at the soup kitchen that she also is associated with.

Everyone in this novel is mourning something; a spouse lost, a spouse better forgotten and the life they ruined, a childhood lost, their own looks lost. Everyone deals with loss differently, but they all have one thing in common: they have all withdrawn from the world to some degree. Who will be able to get over their loss and move on into life again?

I loved the writing; some reviewers have criticized the long sentences but I have no problem with them. I found it difficult to follow the dialog at times; the author doesn’t use quotation marks and frequently doesn’t identify who is speaking. But it’s not bad enough to be uncomfortable. I loved the descriptions of the area the story takes place in, and the mundane settings of everyday life. The narrative changes point of view with each chapter. It’s a rather lovely portrait of damaged people surviving as best they can, although some of the people seem almost too good to be true.

"Leaves resembling whorling flocks of small misshapen birds spiraled sideways through the dusk's graphite solidity, catching silently and stationary on the dark pasture grounds. Before long, night would press into being.

This story delivers such prose and an exquisite evocation of the natural world surrounding the lives of broken people brought together through twists of fate. In their aloneness, each struggles to find purpose and experiences the pain of disconnection. Yet, together, there may be hope after all.

Each chapter focuses on the existence, struggle and depth of character of each individual. The painterly descriptions of place are pure poetry. They're delivered as if a misty veil over the characters of the story.

Although the back-story for the characters is not all rosy and calm, the latter part of the story reads like a gently falling snow in deep winter - a certain hush falls upon the land.

Well done Ms. Wallace!

I am grateful to publisher Houghton Mifflin and Goodreads First Reads for having provided a free advance reading copy of this book. Their generosity, however, did not influence this review, the words of which are mine alone.

A gorgeously-written novel reminiscent of [[Marilynne Robinson]]'s best work ([Gilead], etc.)

A teenage woman, her infant son, and a man who ignores them both arrive in a small town in coastal New England and encamp at a summer cabin resort which is soon closing for the winter. After a few days, the man disappears. The resort owner, a middle-age widow trying to recover from her husband's sudden death, decides to help the young woman, who rarely speaks and makes no demands on anyone. Another townsperson, a recluse suffering from her own marriage (long-ago ended but never forgiven), is recruited to reluctantly house the mother and child for the winter. Other people in town get involved.

Each chapter focuses on a different character (with some duplicates), so that all the major story participants are made accessible to the reader as the story progresses. Love, loss, and redemption are explored in moving and sometimes haunting ways. Just about all these people will leave the reader wanting to know them personally, and certainly the reader will wish the book wouldn't end.

Highly, highly recommended.

This book is truly AMAZING! I was totally hooked and couldn't put the book down. The story is heart rending, but wonderful. The imagery the author puts in your head is amazing...sometimes amazingly beautiful, and sometimes amazingly sad...but still amazing! Beautiful book! I will definitely be reading this one again!

I have never read a book like this one. Imagine the absolute least amount of material, emotional, and physical support a person needs to remain alive, now cut that amount in half, now cut it in half again. Would you still be alive? Would you still be human? How long could you continue to be either one of those things? What if you do manage to barely cling to life, maybe even to humanity and deliberate evil is added to the mix. Can you still hold on? There's winter and not winter, evil and not evil, life and not life, beauty and not beauty, connection and not connection. I would say this is maybe the least American novel I could imagine, so I was not surprised to see that Wallace divides her time living in Greece and France. I would recommend this book to anyone strong enough to read about determination in the face of primal life forces.

I read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks today that fit well with this book:

Kitchenette Building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" mate, a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent", "feeding a wife", "satisfying a man".

But could a dream sent up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms,

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Jamie could still let that dream rise, even though she couldn't yet formulate it, even though she didn't have the room or even the lukewarm water. This attribute made her attractive to some, repulsive to others. And how long could she retain the ability in the face of such deprivation?

Sadly I must say I didn't really enjoy this book. There are some nice descriptions of the bleak landscape of its setting, but too much violence for me. Actually, this book is mainly long stretches of nothing happening punctuated with occasional murders. Also, the author has chosen not to use speech marks, which I find extremely wearing to read. The ending made me laugh, although I don't think it was supposed to.

**SPOILER ALERT**

I wasn't overly fond of The Housekeeper when I was nearing the end. The writing was beautiful and stark, but the characters were shallow and hard to connect with, and there were some very disturbing and chaotic undertones to the story that I didn't care for. But none of that mattered when two pages from the end EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN THE STORY FELL THROUGH A CRACK IN THE ICED UP RIVER AND DIED. Well, that's not entirely true, one of them got to watch the whole thing happen and then wander off.

That ending sucked, folks. There is no other way to paint it. And in a book that I was on the fence about anyway....it made me feel like the entire read was a complete waste of time.