Stone Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "THE POETS HAD COME BEFORE..." (more)
Key Phrases: Catherine Swan, Matthew Swan, Morgan Crawford (more...)

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

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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.com Sales Rank: #1,908,304 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 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 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.

7 of 8 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Literary Treat From a Magnificent New Voice, September 12, 2003

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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