Customer Reviews

The Girl in the Garden

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3 star:		(7)
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I started this book just before bed, intending to only read for about 20 minutes - instead I stayed up all night reading because I could not wait until the next day to find out what happened. It is dark, intriguing, adventurous and relatable to all of us who have experienced that transition between childhood and adulthood in which it comes as a bit of a shock that your parents and extended family have pasts.

I don't read fiction unless it is a great story that keeps me interested. This definitely did that! A perfect beach/summertime read.

I started The Girl in the Garden on a transatlantic flight. I had to change planes in London and I was irritated at being interrupted in the middle of the story, just as some of the intriguing questions and mysteries of The Girl in the Garden were making themselves known.

I loved the voice of young Rakhee, an innocent, cloistered girl who was exposed to a brand new world as a young woman and discovers the secrets of her family's past that will change her life forever. I loved the world Kamala Nair weaved, this Wonderland, where I, like Rakhee, was spirited away during the hours that I devoured this story. It was such a difficult story to read, because I knew I was closer to the end with each page that I turned. The descriptions depicted, the stresses of a young child learning the dark secrets of her family that have been hidden from her, these were all so magical, yet so very tangibly created.

The Girl in the Garden is perfect for that long flight, that incessantly rainy afternoon or simply when you want to get lost in a beautifully written book that will spirit you away. Turn your phone off and disable your doorbell, because nothing can tear you away from The Girl in the Garden.

As other reviewers have noted, it is impossible to turn away from this story once begun, so be forewarned and prepared to read it in one sitting. Though this is only to feel the loneliness of missing a great friend, and to want to begin all over again. Unlike many big stories that try the reader's patience with unnecessary details, Nair's novel efficiently contains a multi-generational family saga, loves, deaths, secrets, ruin, and rebirth. We feel the thrill (and terror) of the heroine's explorations in a new world, of her discovery of her mother's devastating deception, and finally of her catharsis in learning to let judgment evolve into compassion and a return to the people and places that almost destroyed her family.

The originality and beauty of The Girl in the Garden, its wonderful strangeness, and its lifelong friendship with the reader, lie in the heroine's narrative deftness in subtly yet wholly altering the reader's expectations and perceptions of the two worlds of the novel. Nair sharply contrasts the whited sepulcher of Plainfield, in a Midwest as cold and colorless and alienating as its name, with Malanad, a South Indian village as warm and riotously hued and vital as the Indian myths that Rakhee's cousins, her first real friends--particularly the bright, bold, brilliant Krishna--enact for their shy American visitor.

These stories come to signify the sheer force of living that Rakhee has been denied, and has begun to deny herself, as the neglected child of parents imprisoned within their own tragic pasts. They revive her dormant sense of self, and with keen psychological insight into how children perceive their world, Nair shows the therapeutic power of storytelling in helping Rakhee to make sense of the confusing behavior of her mother, of her mother's family, and finally of the devastating secret they have conspired to conceal since before she was born.

Her childhood chronicle is a tone poem startling for its crescendoes of titanic discoveries and confrontations, yet written largely from the quiet wonder of a child's daily explorations and introspections in deciphering, again, the strangeness of growing into oneself.

The magic moment, when the novel ceased to be a compelling mystery about Rakhee's summer journey to India to discover the source of her mother's unhappiness, and became a timeless story that has been told and will always be told, simple yet coiled in complexities vast and deep, came over me as Rakhee observes the incandescent coastline of Kerala from her airplane window. She is awed before so much that is beautiful and beyond her comprehension. Her world, our world, begins to expand to admit the history of a family that stalks softly, under the guise of this impossible beauty, as they unsheath the brutality that will destroy all their old complacencies and lies, making space, finally and gently, for resilience and reconstruction, grace and forgiveness.

Nair's pacing has the courage to avoid easy moderation and formulaic adjustment in her narrative progress, and instead reflects the disproportions of life. Her metronome marks the development of dread, and so the breakdown of the family, as it often happens in real life, with a long peace disrupted by dislocations that are only unwieldy if one hasn't been paying attention. Catastrophe develops gradually, in this case over the course of generations, until suddenly dysfunctions cease to be suppressed and the old order, its foundations increasingly unstable, collapses before one last provocation. Yes, sudden conjunctions of extreme behavior might have been soap operatic were they not preceded by carefully chosen causes and motivations that exist not for sensationalism or excitement but to show how and why things falls apart.

To read The Girl in the Garden as only a mystery is to miss the purpose of its creation. Nair seeks to explain the decline and the regeneration of a family, of survival, yes, but not mere survival, as much as the long, painful process of maturity that comes only as Rakhee, and those she loves, pass through inordinate pain to learn to love without the shame and misplaced pride that nearly laid a waste to the potential of so many unable to see the evil of their good intentions. Nair's purpose, then, is moral, to reveal, without equivocation, the breaking and making of her characters, of ourselves, as we seek the knowledge of our confusing hearts, and that elusive yet finally realized goal of how to live good lives.

Rakhee Singh leaves a letter for her fiancee along with her engagement ring before heading off to India. The letter explains that she has been keeping secrets from him, and that she must return to India to resolve some things that happened there when she was eleven. That summer, while traveling with her mother, Rakhee is introduced to a whole new world which is much different than the life she leads in Minnesota. When she arrives in India with her mother there are a plethora of family secrets that Rakhee plans to solve. Who wrote the letters that drove her mother to make the decision to return to India? Is there really a child-eating monster hiding in the jungle behind the home of her ancestors? What she discovers will shape the person she becomes and will force her to return to her family years later to put this baggage to rest before she can marry the man she loves.

This debut novel from author Kamala Nair is beautifully written. The characters are alive and the story, though slow at times, is well-crafted. The mystery of the "monster" in the garden and the secrets Rakhee's family are trying to hide are interesting, though I did feel the resolve was a little flat. This novel is still worth a read. Nair has an exquisite voice and her descriptions are flawless. It's a quick read, and definitely worth the time.

(Advanced review copy courtesy of NetGalley)

Born into two cultures, Rakhee Singh has built an American life for herself and hides the secrets of her Indian family. But now she's engaged to be married; imagining building a family of her own, she knows she must first make peace with her past, and she wonders if her fiancé will still want to love her.

Kamala Nair's The Girl in the Garden is a book written as beautifully as the garden it enshrines. The author engages readers with vivid depiction of childhood. In America, little Rakhee is always the odd one out, never quite fitting into their neighborhood and school while mother Amma buries secrets in the colors of her garden. In India, Rakhee is accepted as family but still can't trust the love she's offered, and still can't offer what's wanted in return. Meanwhile the garden of her parents' love is filling up with weeds.

Rakhee finds acceptance in another garden, and a beautiful relationship develops while the world falls apart. Innocent discoveries bring guilty mysteries to light. And Rakhee slowly learns what it is she really wants.

The beauty of India, the simplicity of a different world, and the complexity of tradition and relationships are beautifully described in this book. Scents and sounds rise from the page. A child runs through the undergrowth and the reader feels the plants tug at her heels. The writing's as rich as the peacocks and flowers on the cover and the story tugs at the strings of the heart. Rakhee's visit to her past brings grounding and meaning to her present, and the resolution to the mystery is sweet, sad and satisfying, especially when viewed through her adult eyes. The Girl in the Garden is an enchanting story, told in first person with convincing voice, seen through the curious eyes of a child, and building up to the wisdom and love of an adult at peace with herself. It deserves a place next to The Namesake on any bookshelf.



Disclosure: I received an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have read many books by Asian-American women writers, and found this one especially enjoyable, perhaps because I've visited Kerala, India, where almost all of it is set.

It's a lyrically written story set in a village in where the weaknesses and pride of multiple generations reverberates darkly, leading to tragedy and pain as a loving eleven-year-old girl born in Minnesota tries to sort out what's really going on and save her family. It seemed to me to be half fairy-tale and half very modern story, and opened up rural Indian life in a way that made it extremely accessible. It's an easy read and only 300 pages long. I'd love a book on the next generation.

Rakhee Singh is about to graduate with a master's degree from Yale School of Architecture and then begin what she hopes will be a promising career at a design firm in New York. She is also engaged to be married, but this night she is on an airplane back to India. She left her boyfriend the diamond engagement ring and the written story of why she was leaving without saying a word to him. Rakhee, in her note that was attached to story, said she couldn't marry him until she unbound "...the demons that were under her bed" and that she could not marry him until she had "banished them." She signed the note, left her address in India and hoped he would understand.

You see, Rakhee had pretty much led him to believe that she'd only ever been in Plainfield, Minnesota where she grew up. He had no idea whatsoever that Rakhee had spent an entire summer when she was 10 years old in Kerala-Malanad, India. Malanad was a rural village in Kerala, located at the southernmost tip of India. What occurred that summer kept me bound to the pages like a duck on water until I was done. Even though my copy is the large print version, I read all 477 pages in one sitting with only short breaks for tea!

The story that emerged the summer Rakhee was 10 will stay with me forever! I adored Rakhee, such a caring, intelligent and extremely caring and understanding girl for her age. I loved the other characters just as much, especially Tulasi and Krishna. This story reminded me so much of Rohinton Mistry's `A Fine Balance', which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

The writing in "The Girl In The Garden" was brilliant, intelligent, fluid and flowed beautifully like a stone being tossed upon the water and watching the concentric circles of water teaming out one after the other. "The Girl In The Garden" could be a best book of 2011 and in my opinion, ranks right up there with `The Help' and `The Kitchen House'. This is an unbelievable accomplishment for a "debut" novel!! Kamala Nair writes with the passion and talent of a well-seasoned author.

Thank you Kamala Nair for one of the most beautiful and entertaining stories I've read this year!!

It's always exciting to find a beautifully written story filled with intriguing characters, a foreign setting, and suspense, which is precisely what Kamala Nair has given us in her imaginatively wrought debut THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN.

We first meet Rakhee Singh as a young woman engaged to be married. However, she realizes that she has not told her fiancé everything about herself. She writes him a letter, which says in part, "This is why I am leaving behind the diamond ring you gave me, which I never should have accepted in the first place, not when there are still secrets between us. Until I have gone back to the place where it all started, and told you everything, I cannot wear your ring or call myself your wife."

The receipt of a letter from India in handwriting that she instantly recognizes has caused Rakhee to leave the man she loves behind and fly to India to confront the secret she has kept hidden. Thus, in a flashback the reader is taken to the summer Rakhee was ten. She is living in Minnesota with her mother, Amma, and father, Aba, whom she adores. It is a confusing time for the child because Amma has changed, become unpredictable, tearful, sharp following the arrival of letters from India.

Amma soon decides to take Rakhee and visit her family in rural Kerala. It is a place Rakhee could hot have imagined, unbearably hot, mysterious. She meets her three cousins who seem to believe that a ghost lives behind a stone wall that they are forbidden to touch. It is a disturbing time as both Amma and a strict, stone-faced aunt often weep behind doors. Dev, a crude, unlikable fellow, is catered to by members of the family for reasons unfathomed by Rakhee.

As the days pass Rakhee fears that Amma will never take her home to Minnesota and Aba but plans to stay in Kerala. So, despite stories of a Rakshasi, "a hideous she-demon who feeds off the flesh of children," living behind the stone wall Rakhee braves the wall in an attempt to find out why her relatives are acting so strangely. What she finds there is the beginning of unraveling the unbelievable deception that has shaped so many lives.

Nair has crafted a spellbinding tale rich with details of everyday life and death in rural India, and the sociological aspects of that country. It's a bit of a fairy tale, part family drama - coming-of-age tale, and always fascinating.

- Gail Cooke

Now a newly engaged adult, Rakhee remains haunted by the events of her one summer in India. The novel tells the story of that summer in a long letter written to her fiancee, explaining why she must defer their engagement. Until she confronts her past, she cannot face her future. What happened that summer?

One of these days, I would really love to read a novel set in the Indian subcontinent or with first generation desi folk and not have it be almost entirely depressing. Sure, times are hard there, but there must be some books where no characters commit suicide by jumping into a well. I mean, there just have to be.

I did like this much better than Tiger Hills, but, be warned, its still very sad. Pretty much the only part that isn't completely depressing is the epilogue. Reading both of these novels, I get the idea of just how much family history can haunt people. The mistakes of the previous generation snowball into even worse mistakes by the next. Also, never try to marry your daughter off to an awkward, stuttering creeper, because it never ends well.

The Girl in the Garden confronts tough issues, like depression, arranged marriage, pregnancy and divorce. These issues are dealt with well for the most part, not hitting the reader over the head with an agenda. Through Rakhee, it is clear that issues of childhood take a long time to get over (so true), but that it is important to get closure before trying to be a real person, so that you can close the cycle.

The plot twists were pretty much all things I saw coming from many miles away. There really was no other way things were going to go. There is one twist that I swear was not revealed but must be the case. I rather wish I could talk with someone else who read the book so that they could tell me if I'm crazy or not; all I can say is that it involves Prem.

Overall, this wasn't a book I particularly enjoyed, but, for those who enjoy tragic family stories, this is quite well done.

The first chapter of The Girl in the Garden pulled me right in; a mystery was afoot and I needed to know what it was all about. Rakhee, the main character, has decided that she cannot get married until she settles some issues from her past. The rest of the book is the explanation to her fiance of why she needs to go back to India... Eleven-year-old Rakhee accompanies her mother to spend a summer in India with her mother's family. Throughout the summer Rakhee realizes that the family has a lot of secrets to unravel and mysteries to solve. When the summer ends, things don't work out the way Rakhee planned or hoped they would and she goes back to America, burying the secrets once again. These secrets are what she has to uncover once and for all before she feels she can, in good conscience, move on with her life.
Kamala's descriptive writing style gives the reader a full sense of the colors, smells, and sounds of India; it makes me want to visit so I can experience it for myself. It was a good, plot-twisting read.