Stone Garden: A Novel [Hardcover]

Molly Moynahan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2003

A smart young woman making her way through the privileged terrain of northeastern prep-school land, Alice McGuire is certain of her world and her future -- until the summer her best friend and soul mate, Matthew Swan, vanishes on a trip to Mexico. Stunned, Alice and the rest of the close-knit town that adored Matthew search for answers. For Alice, the journey of heartbreak leads from everything that is familiar to forbidden places and forgotten people who will teach her about kindness and forgiveness: lessons that will open her to new possibilities and unexpected hope.

Each night before I went to sleep I imagined exactly how his hand felt in mine, the ring he inherited from his grandfather, heavy, inside my palm. And I told him how much I loved him. Whispering in the dark like when we were little and slept over at each other's house, telling secrets until one of us dropped off the edge of the night. ... That's what you do when you love someone: You hold on tight and you don't forget anything.

With sensitivity, and astonishing realism, Molly Moynahan skillfully unfolds a funny and devastating tale of pain and courage, love and transcendence, honesty and memory. Vividly wrought, deeply resonant, and told in a remarkable voice that sparkles with wit and wisdom, Stone Garden is a splendid triumph from an accomplished new writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rich-kid glamour mixes uneasily with tragedy in this well-intentioned but faintly smug second novel by Moynahan (Parting Is All We Know of Heaven). Alice McGuire's picture-perfect world crumbles after the bones of her missing best friend, Matthew Swan, are discovered in a shallow grave in Mexico. Devastated, the Millstone Country Day senior struggles with her romantic dreams of what might have been and the impact of her devastating loss-"I could feel Matt's dying in every inch of me, skimming across the surface of my skin, soaking into my pores when I stood under the shower.... Grief is fifty times harder than AP Calculus." For a while, the self-absorbed Alice has trouble empathizing with others mourning the well-liked student, including the frankly lesbian Ms. Hardwood, a perceptive teacher; Catherine, Matt's recovering alcoholic mom, who once had a fling with Alice's dad; Matt's eccentric sisters (one is perpetually stoned, not unlike Hallie, the heroin addict Matt went to Mexico with); Julia, Alice's overachieving Martha Stewart-type mother; and the lonely Sigrid, Alice's talented friend who composes an opera inspired by the long-ago murder of her beloved babysitter. Alice's salvation is her senior project participation in Literacy Behind Bars, a prison creative writing program, where Frank, the man who killed Sigrid's babysitter, is one of her "students." Frank and the other inmates adore Alice, and they spill their guts in perceptive prose, teaching Alice, Sigrid and their Millstone classmates about the redemptive power of forgiveness. Moynahan's smooth, playful prose is engaging, but her characters' emotional turmoil has a glib, rehearsed quality. As Alice puts it early on, "We were spoiled rotten and didn't have a clue." Despite all that follows, the feel-good ending underscores the reader's sense that little has changed.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Moynahan's moving novel examines grief and the loss of innocence through the eyes of Alice, who has lost her best friend and soul mate, Matthew. Matthew went off to Mexico, intending to break up with his needy girlfriend and come back home to be with Alice. But he never returned, and a year later, his bones are discovered in a mass grave. Alice, a senior in high school, has been feeling the loss, the absence of Matthew, every day since he went missing. She decides her senior project is going to be teaching a class at the local prison. There, she finds a small class full of angry but loyal men, including Frank, a man who murdered the baby-sitter of Sigrid, a girl Alice has recently befriended. Alice doesn't know how to tell Sigrid she's been teaching Frank, especially as the murder of her baby-sitter haunts Sigrid much the same way Matthew's murder haunts Alice. Moynahan has a gift for capturing the youthful voice of her narrator, and she tells her story with evocative, beautiful prose. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (September 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060544260
• ISBN-13: 978-0060544263
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,246,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved it!, September 4, 2003

By 

"sallythelibrarian" (Bethesda, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stone Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating, insightful story set in a high school where a young man has disappeared. But don't let the high school setting fool you, this book is readable for everyone. Moynahan does a terrific job of building her characters and they walk off the pages into your heart. I cared about Alice and her family and wanted them to be happy. The reader watches Alice's transformation from a spoiled high school kid to a young woman. This will make you think about grief, happiness and family love and will make you laugh! I finished the book immediately handed to a friend and said "Read this! You'll love it." I will also be recommending it to my book club.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars overripe, cliche-ridden and banal treatment of loss, March 11, 2004

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stone Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

Towards the conclusion of Molly Moynihan's cloying and manipulative novel "Stone Garden," her angst-ridden protagonist laments, "How sad to be without a soul." That one sentence neatly encapsulates the essence of Moynihan's writing, soulless. Under the pretense of examining the devastating impact of unexpected death on sensitive adolescents, Moynihan manages to include every conceivable plot contrivance, cardboard characterization and tear-saturated sigh she can muster. The result is a dreary, unbelievable story that achieves the worst possible result: readers who lack sympathy for her protagonist and who could care less about the anguish the protagonist presumably feels.

Alice McGuire attends a quasi-private progressive high school in suburban New Jersey. Her classmates, when not busy on cold fusion physics projects, chumming around with budding rap stars, sojourning in Europe or writing operas, aren't so much late teens but weary, jaded adults pretending to be younger. Wise, but stupid beyond her years, Alice mourns the loss of her one-true-love, Matthew Swan, a seemingly perfect young man who just happens to die in Mexico while accompanying a bereft female "friend" who needed his comfort while scoring drugs. Why Matthew would travel thousands of miles with a girl whom he barely knows while leaving his heartthrob Alice behind defies logic, but, as much else in "Stone Garden," believability has long before checked out.

There is not one character who is credible. Not Alice's father, whose goofy laid-back acquiescence is atonement for his adulterous affair with Matthew's drug-addicted mother. Not the earnest and oh-so-wonderful lesbian teacher, Ms. Hardwood, who, in addition to falling in love with the village blacksmith (yes, there is still a village blacksmith...), carries her own long-lost heterosexual lover in her memory. Not in the long-suffering Sigrid, who witnessed the murder of her babysitter by a criminal who coincidentally is inovlved in a prison writing project assisted by, naturally, Alice.

Molly Moynahan should know better. As a teacher, she knows that teens are more complex than the young men and women she presents. As a capable writer, she knows that readers deserve genuine conflict and realistic dialogue. Regardless of age, unexpected death engenders complicated, volatile and unpredictable responses from the living. "Stone Garden" betrays the possibilities of this terrible circumstance, instead preferring overripe, implausible commentary. In this sense, Moynahan's novel is false and fraudulent.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable - not a great book, but a good story, February 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Stone Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

Ms Moynahan's novel made me laugh, cry, and remember my own first teenage love. As other reviews have alluded, the story is a bit fantastic, with unrealistic twists and turns. But it's a novel, a story, and authors are allowed to play around with reality. Do her characters have depth? Yes. Does she describe her locales well enough that I get a sense of place? Yes. Does the plot keep me intrigued and reading? Yes. Is her prose occasionally melodramatic and at times over-the-top? Yes, but so is life.

I laughed as she described the cliques and the classrooms. I wondered at how nonchalant her characters feel towards sex. But I enjoyed her book for what it is, a good story. I was taken away from my daily routine into a world different from my own, and glad for the minivacation.

Is it great literature? No. Did it make me feel something? Yes. So, I recommend it as good girly fluff to wallow in on a cold winter afternoon.