Customer Reviews

Stone Garden: A Novel

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In an industry that probably presses out a book (or two) a minute, so-called "new voices" are a dime a dozen. New voices with original, well-written stories are not nearly as abundant. And that's why STONE GARDEN by Molly Moynahan is such a literary treat. Moynahan is a new voice that knows how to tell a story.

STONE GARDEN is the poignant tale of not just the untimely death of a life only begun, but also the unsettling effect that death has on the fragile life left behind. At book's start, 17-year-old Matthew Swan is dead. Alice, his best friend for over a decade and once-believed future partner, is left behind to mourn, grieve and adjust to the loss. She seeks mindless, disconnected connections in a few physical encounters that leave her, and this reader, asking the unanswerable question of what it would have been like with Matthew, her silenced soul mate, her dead destiny. She seeks solace in conversations and interactions with her parents, her teachers, her friends, and even the inmates at Rahway prison, where she is teaching writing as a school project. But she doesn't find release and her pain of separation is as palpable as Romeo and Juliet's collective pain. Excuse the comparison to that most famous of first-love couples, but it was unavoidable --- it's there on every page of Moynahan's doomed romance.

STONE GARDEN is ripe with surprisingly true teenage dialogue that straddles the worlds of inquisitive childhood and knowing adulthood, stepping back and forth between the two as only adolescents finding maturity and reluctantly shedding innocence can, and as only a very good writer can capture. Screaming she's "not a baby anymore," Alice mounts her pink three-speed Schwinn decorated with pink plastic streamers and takes off down the road to face solo her demons of lost love. "...Matthew Swan had held my face in his hands and told me that he loved me with every part of himself, that he had loved me from the moment he saw me trip over my shoe laces, and while it had taken a while for us to grow up and get it right, we would get it so right that never in the history of love affairs and marriages and big families with beautiful children and grandchildren would anyone get it more right," she reflected with the naïve idealism of a young person struggling with love and death for the first time.

Moynahan knows teenagers, their desires and their hauntings --- and she delivers them in STONE GARDEN. But more importantly, she knows people. STONE GARDEN is more that just Alice's story. A strong cast of well-drawn characters lends even more realism to the story. Matthew's mother and siblings for that matter are 'alternative' in their thinking and appearance; their scenes are hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy, and would be laughable if not so sad in their efforts to deal with Matthew's demise. Alice's younger brother, Alf, designs clothes for fun. A teacher by trade, Moynahan's book could even be called a valentine to educators; a particularly appealing character is the able teacher Alice and Matthew had befriended, whom Alice calls on in her times of need.

The universal issues of death, love and growing up have always been fodder for good books. But few, in my opinion, have crafted the combination so masterfully as Molly Moynahan in STONE GARDEN.

--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara from Bookreporter.com

Stone Garden starts off well enough but soon founders under the weight of all its faults. Alice, who is mourning her dead boyfriend, is an unbelievable character on many levels. She is "exquisitely" beautiful, "wise" beyond her years and just about everyone who meets her loves her including the dead boyfriend who had loved her since kindergarten. But, although Ms. Moynahan would like us to believe Alice is lovable, she simply isn't. She is self-obsessed and amazingly obtuse for someone who is supposed to be so wise. She moans throughout the novel of her loss of Matthew, never thinking about HIS loss of life and how he may have suffered in dying. She betrays her new friend, Sigrid, by consorting with the murderer of her babysitter, a strange action by one who lost her love to murder and by a person supposed to be so wise. And Alice and the other characters in the book speak in ways I can't imagine anyone speaking.

" 'She's God's child even though she's a dyke,' (Alice) said. (Her) mother looked annoyed. 'Valerie Hardwood can sleep with small farm animals and still remain the finest human being I've ever known.' 'Mother!' (Alice) raised an eyebrow. 'I'm telling PETA.'" Honestly, who speaks like this? And Alice's awareness of her teacher homosexuality is a bit too precious. Alice also notes that the white kids at her school can't dance but the kids of color can. Puhleeze!

These are characters you'll remember: poor Alice, whose love-since-kindergarten, Matthew, disappeared and seems to have been found dead; her loving parents and brother; the bohemian family Matthew came from; her new friend Sigrid, who has her own tragic past; the prison inmates Alice works with on her senior project.

What ultimately kept this from being a can't-wait-to-recommend-it book for me is the fact that I just didn't believe, ultimately, that a seventeen-year-old character could have all the wisdom and insight that Alice has. I know many insightful and wise teenagers, but Alice is in another league. Her maturity, her compassion and understanding, even her mistakes, all seemed like the fictional creations of an author. It was a barrier that kept me from becoming entirely immersed.

But I almost was. In spite of Alice's freakish maturity, I found the book engaging, compelling, and, at times, heartbreaking.

I thought this was a wonderful book. The author grabbed my attention right away and I was enthralled the whole book. I was amazed at how well the author understood the feelings and fears of the main character, a high school senior, as she had to come to terms with all the changes in her life, the loss of her best friend and the need to learn forgiveness so she could move on. I really liked all the characters, flaws and all, and I felt by the end of the book, that I wasn't ready for it to end, I wanted to know what happens to everyone! Read this book, I don't think you will be disappointed.

"Well, he said, it's like this-you let me teach you so I learned. We can't just be givers in the world and we can't just take. That's why we came on your team darlin'. It wasn't just how pretty you were but the way you let us show our real selves." so said, Frank the prisoner, the convict.

What a magnificent story Molly Moynahan has told in "Stone Garden". This is not just a story for teenagers, it is for everyone. How I wish I knew Alice McGuire, the center of the story, and the narrator. Alice lived with her family in New Jersey. She went to school at a prestigious prep school, and she took advantage of it all. Alice is intelligent and loving and lovely. She and Matthew Swan friends since kindergarten were long in love and planning their future. Matthew went to Mexico with a girl he was breaking up with and never returned. His bones were found a year after he went missing. In the interim Alice re-lives her years as Matthew's special friend. Her family and Matthew's family try to piece everything together to make sense of his death.

Alice, as a Senior project starts volunteering at a writing course at the state prison. She is very effective and the convicts who take part in the writing course seem to brighten and grow under her tutelage. She is a beautiful girl, but she also has the ability to believe in them. Most everyone else has given up on them, but not Alice. She makes a change in their lives and in the process she grows and makes a change in hers.

This is a book about death, and a book about living- or learning to live again. A heartbroken young girl learns about kindness and forgiveness and the realm of hope. Her family remains at the helm of her being, but as she grows she also learns to separate.
This is told with courage and honesty and in a teenager's voice, as a teen would speak; smart, funny, trashy, and modern. A book to be highly recommended. prisrob

When I heard that Molly Moynahan's novel was going to be on the NYTimes list of Notable Books for the year, I immediately moved it to the top of my TBR stack and, oh, am I glad I did. Seventeen-year-old Alice McGuire finds herself in the wrong kind of wonderland when Matthew Swan, her soul mate since very early childhood, vanishes while in Mexico. While coping with the grief of a loss that never should have happened, Alice becomes involved with tutoring prisoners in writing for her senior class project. I don't want to give anything away, but this is such a strong and sensitive novel, smart and sad, the best part of it being that the reader goes away feeling as though Ms. Moynahan will have a lot more good stories to tell.

Okay, it goes a little gooey in the end, but you gotta love this girl, this Alice McGuire, who bravely slogs through her senior year at a posh private school while struggling under a load of grief, and who tells it all in full color and in a voice that's perfect-pitch in tune. Matt Swan, her boyfriend since kindergarten, ran off to Mexico on a lark, got murdered by drug lords, and little in Alice's sheltered young life has coached her for such a loss. It's a book-long loss, no small challenge for any writer, but Molly Moynahan was more than up to it. How to write a coming-of-age story about grief that is less than lugubrious or isn't drenched in sanctimonious blather? Well, you can make it sometimes funny and always vividly shown, and surround that survivor with a cast of brilliantly conceived supporting players - there's Matt's wild mom and three kooky, loopy sisters, and a friend or two at Alice's school who themselves might make a decent center for such a book. Her pal Sigrid hid in a closet as a child and saw her babysitter be strangled to death by her boyfriend. The murderer is serving time and eventually, through Alice's intervention, has to face the child who watched this. Every moment of this book brings Alice (and us) to a new turn in her life, and the way her future unfolds in daily surprises makes this book a compelling and very satisfying read. I do know the author, not well, but read it as a fellow writer - looking really hard for the crippling flaw that would allow me to dismiss it. Didn't find it. But that has its own pleasure, too. Now I can pass it along to somebody and think of myself as a dispenser of treats.