Summer is a good time for genre fiction, novels that are plot-driven and compulsive reading. If they have great characters, that's all the better.
I needed something completely different to read and so picked up my Goodreads friend's novel The Garden of Blue Roses. I found it to be a stylish, creepy story with an unreliable narrator who may be insane. Thankfully, the atmosphere of horror and mayhem is mostly in the narrator's imagination, but for a final bloody deed. The story moves at a good clip, nicely suspenseful.
The novel opens just after the narrator Milo and his sister lose their parents in a freak car accident. Their father was a well-known horror writer. Both children are damaged by their childhood with a distant mother and father who used them in various nefarious ways.
Klara decides to create a garden. Milo does not support her idea, and worse, he distrusts the gardener she has hired who seems to use his charms to manipulate women clients. Milo is convinced that Henri is mimicking one of his father's murderous creations.
With many twists and turns, the plot resolves without just deserts, the wily villain mastering all.
Michael Barsa grew up in a German-speaking household in New Jersey and spoke no English until he went to school. He's worked as an award-winning grant writer, an English teacher, and an environmental lawyer. He now teaches environmental and natural resources law. His scholarly articles have appeared in several major law reviews, and his writing on environmental policy has appeared in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times. His short fiction has appeared in Sequoia. The Garden of Blue Roses is his first novel.
*****
Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty was a book club read, suggested by my hubby who had enjoyed the book.
Our club members mostly said the same thing: the book was easy to read, the author knew how to keep us flipping pages, but the book was pure entertainment without a message to take away. One lady wanted to edit 100 pages out of the book. Another loved, loved, loved it and said it was her favorite we had read in a while.
Then we discussed the novel for another 45 minutes. Which is interesting, since it had been decided the book had nothing really to say!
It turned out that we had a lot of strong feelings about the characters and their actions. And we talked about good and bad parenting and who was truly guilty. And how the author had perfected a style that pulled the reader along.
My hubby loved the book because it was a close study of three couples and he loves books about interpersonal relationships. I also enjoyed the book as a character study.
In the end, everyone agreed it was a nice summer read.
*****
Last spring, I put my name on the waiting list to borrow the ebook from the library through Libby. It finally came to me this week!
Helena has kept her past a secret from her husband. She needed to escape the public eye so she changed her name and created another past. Her carefully constructed world come toppling down when the police come to her door because her father has escaped from prison. Helena's husband learns she is the daughter of the infamous Marsh King who had kidnapped her teenaged mother. and held her, and their child, hostage for years.
Helena grew up in the marshes, admiring her father who taught her to hunt and survive on the land. He had a brutal side and dealt out harsh punishments. She did not know anything else until she saw a happy family at Tahquamenon Falls--the first outsiders she had ever seen. When Helena was fourteen her mother tells her the truth, and Helena orchestrates their escape.
Helena knows she is the only person who can find her father. While she tracks her father through the territory she explored at his side we learn of her childhood and understand her turmoil. Helena knows too well her father is a narcissistic psychopath, but she also recalls how she loved him and the wilderness survival skills he taught her.
The novel is informed by Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale The Marsh King's Daughter.
Michigan is beautifully portrayed in Dionne's descriptions. The wildness, the flora and fauna, the tourist traps, and the brutal deforestation are all encountered.
The Marsh King’s Daughter is in development as a feature film.
Book Club Kit can be found at https://randomhouse.app.box.com/s/4wcjrvzj3f869qucg8gi6wxaee2rihs9
