Customer Reviews

The Garden Angel: A Novel

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thank goodness I found this novel -- it's pure delight, and hard to believe it's a debut novel, to boot. The Garden Angel was total refreshment from beginning to end. I stayed up all night to finish it, and the well-crafted story deeply resonated. I was moved by the ending. This novel examines the layers of "home" and what home means to different characters -- interesting, complex, funny, and appealing characters. Poignant yet humorous in places, it's a delightful piece of literature that deserves the praise it's getting. It is SO MUCH BETTER than other novels out there right now on the NYT list. Thanks, Mindy, and keep writing!

Just finished reading The Garden Angel.....and really dragged out those final pages, because I didn't want it to end!
Wonderful debut novel with prose that flows, characters that made me feel like I knew them personally and Friddle displayed a terrific sense of place.
I highly recommend this novel and honestly have to say it's been ages since I enjoyed a story as much as this one. Down-to-earth and believable. Do yourself a favor and read this one. My only regret is I'm going to miss Cutter, Elizabeth, Alfred and the rest of the cast. Very much looking forward to Friddle's next novel.

This is a wonderful book, written by someone who knows how to tell a story! I picked this book up on a rainy afternoon, found myself wrapping up the words and the story all around me, like a warm blanket, and I couldn't quit reading until the end. Which by the way, I was sorry to get to, I miss the people already. Read this book, you will be glad you did. Ms. Friddle, hurry with your next book, I can't wait.

The Garden Angel is such a special book that after I finished it in one night, I wanted to just curl up with it and go to sleep. Lovely, wise, funny, interesting, unique ... this writers really knows how to please her readers. I love how the author plays around in all the gray areas of life, reminding me that life is to be lived and not judged. This is a superb book club book, by the way!

Southerners will feel right at home with this quirky novel. Its eccentric characters could fit right into our own family scrapbooks, and its reverence for the past and suspicion of the encroaching future pose a conflict being played out across the length and breadth of Dixie-and might even be encapsulated in our ambivalence nowadays toward using the word "Dixie" as a synonym for the South.
Just outside of Palmetto, S.C., in the small town of Sans Souci, Cutter Johanson lives in a dilapidated mansion that houses the comforting ghosts of her ancestry. The urban sprawl of Palmetto, which is a thinly disguised Greenville, threatens to engulf the small town that has been home to Cutter's family for generations, but an even more immediate threat is that the death of Cutter's grandmother has brought the house up for sale. Desperate to keep the old home place, Cutter goes to great lengths to sabotage efforts to sell it, but she knows she is fighting a losing battle. Her sister Ginny, "the pretty one," and brother Barry, away in service, are eager to sell, and Cutter, though working two jobs, both menial, can not afford to buy them out.
Enter a kind of Delphic fate: Ginny, a college student, is having an affair with a teacher, Daniel Byers, and is pregnant by him. His aggrieved wife Elizabeth is an emotional cripple whose agoraphobia and panic attacks keep her a virtual prisoner in her home, significantly a run-of-the-mill subdivision ranch house. Not least, Elizabeth's main affliction is a husband so caring that he seems to have an unhealthy need for his wife to remain a cripple. Stir into that mix an anonymous telephone tip to the unsuspecting wife, and a solution to Cutter's problem that she could never have imagined is set in motion.
The attentive reader will see it coming when Elizabeth somehow manages to summon the strength to venture out and knock on the Johansons' front door. When Cutter answers the door, the die is cast: Two oddballs, one strong, one weak, come face to face, and the reader, recognizing their compatibility right away even if they don't, knows that they will wind up with each other when the dust has cleared-though in what arrangement is a nice, and logical, surprise.
The story of how all this happens is highly readable and, for the most part, deliciously written. Ms. Friddle's prose shines, especially with apt and poetic similes--but she comes awfully close to overdoing a good thing: Too many similes can be tiring and come across finally as the same artistic trick done too often to retain its freshness or, worse, as a kind of misdirection. Not for nothing did Gertrude Stein advise writers that in describing something it is usually better to say what a thing is than what it is like, i.e. "A rose is a rose is a rose."

I had grown so tired of being disappointed in cookie cutter novels about women and friendship. As if it were a hot topic du jour and authors were just jumping on the bandwagon. This was a GOOD BOOK. An unlikely friendship, humor, heartache and women finding themselves and their strength.
Ms Friddle has set a high standard for herself, I look forward to the next one.

if you are looking for something different , Mindy Fiddle does it in this story. Its an easy read, easy to follow characters and you feel a sense of being there with the story. It was fun to read and worth every penny.. dont miss out on this one .Nicole

Oh, Lordy, it's all here -- the Old House, with its intimate graveyard; the itchy old furniture and bad plumbing; the endearingly peculiar neighbors, to whom the big old doors are never closed; the two thankless survivors who want a quick buck out of the place,and the gritty young sister who holds on -- with some of the funniest and most believable deep-down-dirty tricks in the book -- because she can't bear the thought of leaving it. Nor should she have to!
This is the quintessential touching and hilarious Southern book. Yankees may be odd, but not like this. The heroine works her way into the folds of the reader's memory as have few in modern literature, as a symbol of perseverence, guilelessness, generosity, and above all, Keeping the Faith.

The characters in this book feel so familiar and real! Mindy has a wonderful way of making me feel as though I was actually on the front porch. She captured the true emotion and personality that can only be found in the South. I'm eagerly awaiting the next one!

Mindy Friddle has written an unforgettable novel filled with sharply drawn characters and well-crafted prose. This is a must-read for fans of Southern fiction. A stunning debut!