Customer Reviews

Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I enjoyed this book very much, and would recommend it to anyone who goes to Kauai, and particularly to anyone who is interested in the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG). Fleeson is a good writer and a good storyteller. She has an interesting story to tell, and I enjoyed hearing it. Yet there was something about that book that was less than completely satisfying.

"Waking up in Eden" has many compelling passages and some that seem strangely dry and out of place. My copy is about 300 pages long. I think I could have made a better 225 page book from this manuscript. There are passages, one about a restaurant in Honolulu, another about a birthday luau for Japanese child, that read exactly like well written articles for the Style section in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. Unfortunately, these are exactly the kind of articles that I usually skip, and I found it odd that they somehow made their way into a book on a subject I found engaging. Other passages, notably a wonderful section on Kuaui resident Keith Robinson, again read like a passage from a newspaper, but this time I wanted to hear much more about the topic, as it seemed very germane to the main themes of the book. When the passage ended, I felt as though I were left hanging. The author had my complete attention, and this was a book, not a newspaper, and so I expected more on a subject that was so central to the book.

The book had two primary themes:

1) The National Botanical Garden
2) A woman's attempt to make a life a in Kauai

When Fleeson stuck to these topics, I enjoyed almost everything she wrote. If anything, I wanted to hear more about the garden, and more about her struggles to build a life in the tropics. I wasn't at all bored when she wrote about her parents, or about the office politics at her job as a fund raiser for the garden. She writes well, and when she found a topic worthy of her efforts, I enjoyed what she had to say very much. This is not, however, a great book about a voyage of self-discovery, nor is it a great book about botanical gardens and the struggle to preserve or understand the ecology of Hawaii.

Fleeson is very talented, and could perhaps do almost anything she wants. However, in this book, I felt that she wanted to preserve her friendships and her future career more than she wanted to tell the real truth about her personal life or the National Tropical Botanical Garden. She is an excellent reporter, and I learned a lot about her life, and lot about the NTBG. Yet I always felt that the real truth lay just outside the margins, just a few sentences beyond the text found in the book. Perhaps that is why I was so frustrated by the paragraphs on the restaurants in Honolulu. She was reverting completely to her journalistic roots, and turning her back on a reader who wanted to hear more.

Yet I would recommend this book to anyone who is drawn to its subject matter. Certainly her passages on the fascinating Isabella Bird are among the best I've read on that remarkable author, and they alone make the book worthwhile. Indeed, there are many other fine passages in the book. Please go ahead and read it, just don't expect too much.

Lucinda Fleeson's memoir "Waking Up in Eden" is no navel gazer - thank you very much - but the true adventures of a women who, nearing middle age, woke up to smell the coffee and instead of freaking out took a giant gulp of it and got on with her life.
Leaving her job at the Philadelphia Inquirer and her home with its English rose garden Fleeson moves to the Hawaiian island of Kauai and its 1000 acre tropical garden. This is a volitile and damaged isle whose natural order is fast disappearing. What is also disappearing is her youth and some of her choices. In a chatty and unselfconscious way Fleeson re-examines her heart's desire and tallies up her wins and losses, all the while packing her trekking boots. The adventure is on and soon enough it is not so much the exotic isle and its fragile flowers or even the colorful characters dedicated to saving them, but Fleeson's inherent interest in, well, everything, that makes her journey a page turner.
Officially, Fleeson job is to raise funds for the National Tropical Botanical Garden - an Eden that is in serious risk of imploding. Proposal writing and coaxing money out of rich people could sound rather dry but Fleeson is a deft writer. The people, politics and history surrounding the NTBG is intriguing enough, but its how Fleeson grabs onto her new life that swept me up. She gets her hands dirty in the island's red clay, rides horseback along its beaches, treks up mountains climbing through dense jungle, tries surfing, learns to row like hell with the Kawaikini Women's Canoe Club and before she leaves plants her own tropical garden.
Along the way Fleeson introduces herself, and us, to a gaggle of interesting and passionate people and its here that we see the true depth of Ms. Fleeson's nature, her search for her authentic self reveled by her insight into others. One telling example is her description of Alan Wong, a celebrated Hawaiian chef, "....he scans your eyes, as if looking to see if the information arrived. It's a listener's trait .... indicative of a great teacher." And Ms. Fleeson appears to be both.
Fleeson teaches us a lot about exotic flora (which is more interesting than you might think) but she shows us that taking big risks, forcing one's passions and keeping on your big girl panties (most of the time) may not answer all of life's questions but it is the only way to live them.
From Kauai Ms. Fleeson moves on to Budapest - I can't wait for the sequel.
Elva Malone
August 20, 2009

When my review copy of "Waking Up in Eden" arrived from the publisher, I took one look at it and thought, "oh, another female-midlife-crisis memoir."
I didn't think about it again until weeks later. I was leaving for a weekend getaway and needed a paperback to bring along. I picked up Lucinda Fleeson's book and practically couldn't put it down for the next 48 hours. What a lovely memoir. Mesmerizing. Her personal narrative of navigating a creatively fulfilling life is balanced with a journalist's unrelenting efforts to report on Kauai's horticulutural world, past and present. As a garden writer, I swallowed it, inhaled it, and imagined the Kauai she described.
I visited the island once, 25 years ago. But I feel like Lucinda gave me a personally-guided tour in the pages of "Waking Up." It was a tour I never would have discovered on a vacation visit.

I bought this book for a birthday gift for a dear friend who loves Kauai. She devoured this book on our trip and said she even learned a lot of things about the island that she didn't already know having lived there before. I can't review it as having red it myself, but she loved the book!

I didn't intend to read this book. Looking for Kauai guidebooks to plan an upcoming trip, I downloaded the Kindle-edition sample. Intending to skim, I found the language so lovely and clear that I couldn't pass it by. By the end of the sample I felt like I'd cracked open an adventure story; I quickly bought the rest. It was hard to put it down over the following day, and I stayed up all night finishing it.

The story -- and it is more that than memoir -- flows like warm but sparkling water. The writing is beautiful; the word choices are especially fascinating. I'm a ballroom dance fan and I felt the awe I do when watching masterful dancing. Ms. Fleeson is a journalist, and although this book is not journalism, it's written with the clarity of great reportage.

The story has intrigue, humor and even sex. The main characters are interesting, passionate people with curious minds and refreshing and often funny personalities. Several are inspiring. As the author moves the story forward, she weaves these people into a compelling and engrossing tale. The book is as much about these others as it is about Ms. Fleeson.

A gardening theme runs through the book, but it's more a venue and a talisman than a topic. The saga of native-plant extinction is part of the backdrop, as is a bit of history about the peopling of Hawaii and some observations on the current culture. I'm realizing that there was a surprising amount of material in this small book.

This book is an engaging, enjoyable adventure, a lovely read, and I'm sure I'll find it memorable. I'm happy to have stumbled upon it. I'd like to thank Ms. Fleeson for writing it.

When I ran across this book about Kauai at an online book club (Suzanne Beecher's), I had to give it a try. I consider Kauai a little piece of Paradise. And I'm so glad I got a copy from Amazon, because reading it was like a visit to that special place. It was not only an intimate account of this beautiful island, but also a wonderful lesson in living the "life examined." Following Lucinda Fleeson's whim to accept a job there in a botanical garden, the reader is led on a wonderful learning adventure about our history as a people and even the state of the planet. I loved the way Lucinda gained self knowledge by opening herself up to other people and cultures. Her friendship with the Garden's director, Dr. William Klein, sets the drama of the book when she joins him as fund raiser. She is good at her job, and Dr. Klein's big dreams for the place provide excitement.

This book is so well written and so well researched that it is an absolute pleasure to read. I can't wait to visit Kauai again and discover the Garden for myself.

Lucinda Fleeson's provided us with a luscious memoir. Here we see a skilled and thoughtful reporter craft a complex narrative, weave it into the gardens of her life and work. She steps away from the Philadelphia Inquirer at the moment the newspaper (along with many throughout the country) are shifting from reportage to, well what? What have newspapers become? Gone, many. Light, many others. Not news, sad to say.

On a chance invitation, she relocates to a remote Hawaiian island and takes the job of fund raiser for the National Tropical Botanical Gardens [...]. At first, resented as an outsider by her staff and garden employees, she eventually wins their support and becomes an energetic partner to the Garden's entrepreneurial director. She takes over a dilapidated remote plantation cottage and turns it into a single woman's paradise. Each adventure presented is taken up, researched, recorded and now we are the beneficiaries of that reportage: Hawaiian WWII and Red Cross efforts, the Pansy Craze in the Chicago region during the 1930s, botanizing and field collecting and preserving endangered Hawaiian flora, restoration of plantation cottages, outrigger canoe competition and history, and most of all the real work -- intrigue, vision, joy, angst, stupidity, -- of running a nationally recognized botanical garden.

Lucinda Fleeson's memoir joins the sparse ranks of women's memoirs that don't end with marriage or the birth of their first child. She leaves us in mid-life -- single, strong, going on to another stage of her life and work. She leaves us wanting to read the next book she writes, not matter what the subject.

Many dream of dumping everything and going off to live on a tropical island. Lucinda Fleeson actually did it. "Waking Up in Eden" tells her story and it makes for a lively, engaging tale.
Fleeson was a top-notch, award-winning journalist who found the profession she loved undergoing massive, distressing changes as the digital age reconfigured the newspaper industry. Offered a job at the Nation Tropical Botanaical Gardens in Kauai, she sold her house, shed years of routines and belongings and left her old life behind.
Fleeson ruminates on many personal topics, from the sudden loss of both parents to her thoughts on being a single woman confronting a future without the traditional husband and kids that she had always assumed would be there. But it's the investigative reporter in her that provides some of the most colorful moments of "Waking Up in Eden". Her description of the death-defying botanists who climb to high mountain ledges to rescue endangered plant species is an eye-opener. And her research into the wealthy, original owners of the estate which has become the National Botanical Garden reveals a colorful, jazz-age tableau of underground gay history in Chicago before the Great Depression. Fleeson also uncovers the writing of Isabella Bird, a 19th century woman writer who's adventures in Kauai both echo and inspire Fleeson's own.
Interspersed throughout the book are moments of workplace intrigue, romance, tragedy and humor (the ladies rowing team story is a delight), told with a reporter's skill and insights.
I highly recommend "Waking Up in Eden" as an interesting, entertaining and worthwhile read.

I love Kauai and visit whenever I can. This book gave me many more ideas of places to visit, including Chicago where two of the main characters came from. A wonderful book.

For anyone who has ever visited Kauai and been lucky enough to spend time in the National Botanical Garden this book is a must. Learn about Hawaii, the drive to retain native plants and the background of how this "Eden" was created. Enjoy the adventures of a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter on the wettest spot on the Earth. Appreciate the struggle that Nature faces constantly. This book is a keeper!