Scenes in The Forgotten Garden

I'm still pondering settings . . .

Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden, struck me hard. I think the story packed a walloping punch because of her intense storyworld, and the severe contrasts between settings.

I consider the parched, oppressively hot summer in Australia, where everything struggles to grow in the garden and a little girl hides beneath the house to escape the heat . . . and then we travel to a cold, dark mansion on the west coast of England, drenched in rain and surrounded by an enormous verdant green lawn and formal garden. The constant pounding of the sea on the cliffs below fails to soothe it's inhabitants. Ms. Morton takes the reader to a dirty, tiny attic room in grey London serving as a refuge of sorts for an orphan, but later we find the same orphan imprisoned in a quaint cottage perched on a cliff above the ocean with an extraordinary walled garden attached.

These juxtapositions and clearly detailed settings are etched in my mind. I close my eyes and stand in an unfriendly London street shrouded in fog and the stench from turn-of-the-century city-life, or lift my face to the sun and imagine the garden Makepeace planted, an apple tree and its spring blooms.

Thank you, Kate Morton, for your vivid sense of place, and for creating places my mind can wander back upon. Read her book and you will see what I mean.

Favorite Escapes

The setting in a novel is huge. It’s the silent character. Readers may not pay close attention, but without setting, you are literally nowhere.

When I read the last page of a great novel, I often close my eyes and remember the most distinct places the author took me in the book. I want to take a few posts to talk about my favorite escapes in fiction.

I will start with the side of a cliff in A Soldier of the Great War by Marc Helprin. There’s a scene where the protagonist, a professor of aesthetics and a soldier, must climb a cliff using very little equipment. He does not know what he’ll find at the top, but describes the air and the light as it ricochets off the rock from his unique point of view. I almost felt the coolness of the mountain, welcome warmth from the sun on his back and I saw all the scenery around him. I still see it.

Helprin also took us to a WWI foxhole in the same novel. I see dust raining on the soldiers under attack. The low ceiling, everything looks gray, covered with dirt and fear. Men crawled across the unforgiving floor, yelling at one another as the walls crumbled around them. The tension and fear pulse in my gut even when I remember the scene, because the setting is so vivid in my mind.

That’s the beauty of good description. If I can go back to a scene in fiction years after I read the book, the place has become real to me. As real as any other memory.  

This is great fiction.

What we're doing here . . .

 I know, I know. Another blog. Just what you need, right? Well, I’ll be up front with you. On this blog, we’re just talking about books.  Not reviewing them, not slamming them, not selling them (until I get published, then I may suggest you buy one).

Instead, I’d like to duplicate the magical thing that happens when you’re in the middle of a conversation and you realize that one or more participants have read the same book. What follows is an entrance into an alternate universe, time or place. You teleport back into a story that changed you and compare notes with someone else who visited the same story, and came away changed as well. I’m convinced that moments like these (and the books that provide them) are one reason I’ve avoided therapy all these years.

Have you had a moment like this? If not, come back to this page! I hope we can discuss specific books, books in general, themes in fiction, scenes in fiction and a host of other things. This blog is for readers. Before I became a writer, I was a reader. It’s in my DNA. I love reading and I love to interact with other readers.

Even if you only read billboards these days, you’ll find suggestions to improve your repertoire. If you’re over the top well-read, then I invite you to teach us what you know. And if you’re like me and you love to read, you’ll find yourself in good company.

More than anything, this is a place to chat. And I will promise not to be too wordy. But I do love words, so . . . I’ll do my best.

Blog Premiere

In general, if there’s something “everybody’s doing,” then I try my best to avoid that thing, unless of course, I manage to be one of the first. However, on occasion I find I must do that very thing which is in itself distasteful, yet frustratingly tempting. And so I blog.

Since I must do what I might not wish to do (because everyone and their brother is doing the same thing), then I will endeavor to do said dreadful and lemming-like thing in a different way.

Sunshine and Little Debbies make me happy. But true happiness strikes like lightening. You might be expecting it, but you cannot predict which moment it will hit. Or where. Or how.

I wish you a moment today; a moment of happiness, whether caused by Little Debbie snack cakes or a lotto win or a smile flashed just for you. Look for it. Seriously, look for it.

And look for my next blog post—I’ll start in earnest then.

First Post Test Post