| Title | : | The Garden (Into Shadow, #1) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 44 |
| Publication | : | First published November 15, 2022 |
Fifteen years ago, Lęina’s mother, Yuliana, went searching for a mythical place called the Garden and never returned. Determined to learn the truth about what happened, Lęina travels to Brazil to search for the hidden realm, with Yuliana’s journal and a local tour guide leading the way. But Lęina soon begins to wonder if she’s looking for answers—or if what she truly wants to find is herself.
The Garden (Into Shadow, #1) Reviews
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One of the stupidest things I ever read.
A meaningless story about a kook who hires a guide in Brazil to take her to 'The Garden' where she believes her mother went after abandoning her.
Not only does the story feature horrible poetry, but the MC also speaks in horrible poetry sometimes. Out loud. To other people. In seemingly normal conversations.
It's so fucking stupid. There's also no plot nor resolution. I don't know what the author intends me to feel but surely it's not pity that this Brazilian is stuck with some crazy American tourist who speaks in riddles and asks him inane questions like, "Which parent did you hate the most?" and "Do you believe in magic? Real magic - like the sun and the moon and the stars. And wolves that roam free at midnight... Fated love that heals old scars?" I mean, WHAT THE FUCK. What the fuck is this. Then she's contemplating if she loves him. LOVES HIM. This guy she met yesterday, the guy she hired to take her into the jungle. What the hell is wrong with this woman?
Highly disrecommend. Avoid. I don't care if Amazon is giving it out for free.
Here's an example of an inane conversation in this story:
"Then do you believe in curses?"
"I don't know."
"You're ruining the game."
"Is this a game?"
"Don't answer my question with a question."
"Even if my question leads to the answer?"
Angelo took a moment to think as he drove his red Jeep. Lęina counted the lighters around his car: two with spiral patterns, one dotted with stars.
"I think people can be cursed," he finally answered. "I've met a few."
"What happened to them?"
"Misfortune followed them like a cloud. Bit by bit, it took them down."
"So people can be cursed?"
"I think people can be cursed."
"People - but not books?"
"I think something has to be alive to be cursed."
"And you don't feel something alive in books? Haven't you ever felt the kiss of fabled winds brush across your face?" Lęina whispered. "Haven't you ever found yourself floating in an infinite space? Haven't you shed tears for characters you've never known? Felt emotions that can't possibly be your own?"
Angelo stared at Lęina as though transfixed.
Yeah, transfixed by the idea that he's agreed to be a guide to this fucking weirdo.
"You don't know that feeling?" Lęina pushed. "Deep, deep in your heart?"
"I think I do...," Angelo finally answered.
"Then you think books can be alive."
Lęina nodded in triumph. She returned her forehead to the window.
"You believe in curses, Angelo. I know you do." 35%
So fucking dumb. I would drive her back to the airport immediately if I were him. No amount of money, I swear.
NAMES IN THIS BOOK: -
Umm...this was not good. I enjoy these short story collections Amazon puts together by different authors and the Into Shadow collection has a couple of my favorites. But The Garden was a rough start. I feel kind of bad because there aren't a lot of other ratings yet, but I've got to be honest.
I believe this is Adeyemi's first foray into writing for adults, but this feels very amateurish. Each chapter begins with very bad poetry, and the entire story is a woman traveling in Brazil with a guide to a mythical garden mentioned in her mother's possibly cursed journal. That sounds interesting, but I promise you it is not.
We never see the garden, just the trip. She says the journal is cursed, but we don't know why or whether it is. She is not a great traveler (freaking out about drinking water with local ice in it, being grossed out by food etc), and is flirting with the guide, which feels really weird to read. It reminds me of the cringiness of traveling in college with girls who would flirt with local boys because they were "exotic". The prose is trying very hard to be emotionally evocative but just feels maudlin. The story waxes poetic about believing in curses and...I don't know. This did nothing for me and I honestly had second-hand embarrassment reading some of the poetry. Yikes. -
Hopefully, my review transfers over here from Amazon but if not just know that I didn’t enjoy this at all. What could have been a great exploration of the complex relationship between parent and child read like the dairy of a teenager who writes cringey poetry. I’m not sure what readers were supposed to get out of this, but it had potential to do something interesting and it failed in execution. I just knew that we were going to get some interesting fantastical elements, but nope we didn’t even get that. I’m not sure if “the garden” is supposed to be metaphorical for the garden of Eden where all life is said to begin; however, that’s lost in the grand scheme of the book. Alas, I had low expectations after reading my last book from her, but it still wasn’t able to curb the disappointment I got from reading this.
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Thank goodness this was short because it was hard to sit through. I don’t even know where to begin with this one. A whole lot of nothing going on really, just an odd book and I don’t recommend it.
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This reads like a 13 year old’s attempts at writing ~deep fiction~ and has some astoundingly awful poetry.
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2.5 Stars
Offered to read for free for Amazon Prime members, this is the first in a collection of short stories with the common theme of those searching for some type of personal truth or knowledge.
Haunting and with no definitive outcome or answers, the reader must infer what happens next. This sort of nebulous story never goes down easy for me, leaving me more confused with plenty of questions that will never ever be answered. Sigh. -
LOTS OF SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE!!!
Okay I know I'm probably one of a very select few who enjoyed this novella, but hear me out. I interpreted this book in probably a darker kind of manner than most people did.
Leina asks Angelo a lot of questions, but most of them remind me of questions that people ask who are still trying to find a will or reason to continue to go on.
Another thing I grabbed from this was that the garden isn't a real place that we can see in our current state or form, more like a "heaven" of some sort. Which may be why we never actually see the garden and why at the end her mother is calling her home. This also makes me think the garden is like a "heaven":
"And if I don't come back?"
"I'll understand." Angelo touched his heart. "I'll pray it's because you found whatever you are looking for."
__
I say a "heaven" because I'm interpreting that Leina mother committed suicide: "..My mother told me of a garden... she followed it to her grave."
Which, in turn, would make the book become a curse because it's leading Leina down the same path but from a different kind of pain: "I think you are drawn to the familiar," Angelo smiled. "As people, we all are. We go to what feels the same. Even if that feeling is pain."
And lastly I'm assuming that Leina hasn't left her own home in reality. I believe this journey is more of a mental and emotional one than an actual trip to Brazil. I also don't believe Angelo is a real person but more of a spiritual guide that Leina has conjured up as a that last voice to keep her from following the same path as her mother: suicide.
Again I could completely be interpreting this in an absolute wrong way than Tomi Adeyemi intended, but as I've been dealing with my own mental health this is how I interpreted this story and in turn it made me enjoy it very much. -
what was the point of this????
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Part prose, part poetry, no part worked for me. I don't want to pile on it, because there's plenty of other reviews here that say it better than I possibly could - it was disjointed, overwrought, and ultimately unsatisfactory.
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The prose are outstandingly beautiful, but the story itself lacks any substance. It's as though it tries to dazzle the reader with fancy words without backing it up with any plot. There's a garden, a journal and so much wasted potential. Disappointing, but this has certainly sparked an interest in more of Champion-Adeyemi's stories.
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I don't know what this was supposed to be?
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We've Got To Get Ourselves Back to the Garden
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook (November 15, 2022), released simultaneously with the Audible Original audiobook.
As hinted in my title quote from the Joni Mitchell song "Woodstock", The Garden is a short story about a daughter following her mother's trail to a supposed mysterious garden in the heart of Brazil. It is a "dreamlike short story told in alternating prose and verse" that follows Lęina and her guide Angelo along the journey. The mother Yuliana had apparently abandoned the daughter in order to pursue this path. I missed understanding how the daughter knew the trail to follow, how did she get the mother's journal? Perhaps I just lost focus. It all ends very abruptly and requires an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert ™.
The Garden is one of seven Amazon Original Kindle eBooks/Audible Audio audiobooks released on November 15, 2022 as part of the
Into Shadow Collection of short stories where "Some truths are carefully concealed; others merely forgotten. In this spellbinding collection, seven acclaimed fantasy authors create characters who venture into the depths where others fear to tread. But when forbidden knowledge is the ultimate power, how far can they go before the darkness consumes them?"
Trivia and Links
You can watch for current and past Amazon Original Kindle short stories which are usually paired with their Audible Original narrations at an Amazon page
here (link goes to Amazon US, adjust for your own country or region).
I had to LOL, as this story's purported 'poetry' seemed to meet Alice Mair's test for prose as she explained in P.D. James'
Devices and Desires, a recent re-read of mine:"... it is poetry, not prose rearranged on the page.”
“With modern verse, can one tell the difference?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “If it can be read as prose, then it is prose. It��s an infallible test.” - Alice Mair explains her test for prose to her brother Alex. -
This is part verse, part story, about a woman's journey to follow her mother's footsteps to a mythical or legendary garden and I sadly didn't like the poetry elements (which just read like bad poetry as opposed to evoking any kind of feeling or visual) or the story.
I felt nothing for the character or the journey and was glad this was one of the shortest of the set. Also very glad I didn't actually start with this and know there is good to be found in this collection. Though I wonder if I've already experienced the best there is? Guess we'll see!
1.5 stars
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This review can also be found at
A Take From Two Cities. -
umm not sure
Sometimes with these Amazon original series, it takes reading 2 or 3 of the stories to understand the theme. That said, I rated this on enjoyment and the writing style. I didn’t like it and the writing felt like it was doing too much. It’s no secret that I hated CoBaB so I went into this with the expectation bar on the ground. In that regard, I guess I got what I was looking for. Short storytelling isn’t for everybody and it’s hard to pull off. -
The negative reviews are more entertaining than this short story was.
I didn't hate it, but it was pretty pointless.
1.5 -
Okay, so I was going to give this 1 star, I didn't really 'get it' but then I checked out some other reviews and across another review which kinda made me see it differently ... I liked that interpretation so I have bumped it to a 2 star.
Not a great start to the series though. -
I think the author probably envisioned an interesting story to tell, which is a big plus. But that story doesn't really exist in the work as written. Maybe someone else will read this story and get a lot out of it, and power to them, but it wasn't for me.
There's a lot of talk about magic and the self, and each section begins with poetry. But the dialogue is faux-profound, and reminds me most of the worst people at college parties who think that being sad gives them greater insight and depth. And the poetry is not high quality, and doesn't really do anything to the plot or emotional development.
The concept of this story is promising, but it's laden with a type of pretension, where the author hints at depth without actually including it. Is the Garden real? Will the main character find her mother? Will the main character ever see her family again? All questions that I don't care about the answers to because the main character is too uninteresting. The technique here is a little bit more developed than say Garth Nix's story in this collection, which doesn't really make anything better apart from making it seem like Adeyemi was more than capable of writing a better story. -
This was not a great introduction to Tomi Adeyemi’s writing. I’m still going to give her YA series a try, but my expectations have been adjusted. This story did a lot of nothing and not enough of everything. The plot is contrived, seeking to be more mystical and evocative than it was. Sure this was brief, but it also felt wholly incomplete, and not in the positive intentionally open-ended manner.
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So imagine yourself as a scene kid tween during your MySpace days trying to leave a very deep-away message on AOL... and now imagine yourself 20 years later reading that away message and eye-rolling at how stupid you were. That's this.
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I wasn't blown away by this but I also didn't hate it the way so many others did.
Some parts were actually written beautifully, and I both appreciated and disliked the vagueness at times. I didn't interpret this story quite as literally as some, my mind definitely went into a darker direction looking for possible explanations of the meaning behind the heroine following her mother's footsteps into the mysterious Garden. Idk, that made sense to me.
All in all, this was not the most riveting story but it was an interesting venture into short storytelling and I'm curious about other Tomi Adeyemi's works. -
*2.5 stars
This would have been infinitely better had the author chosen to focus more of her attention on the actual content of the story rather than its form. The poetry did nothing for me; the poetry-within-prose was a small delight to discover, though it had little (properly explored) material behind it. -
it's either i was too dumb to understand this or the story was just....not good. i was waiting for it to have some semblance of a substance but nothing came. it ended without anything happening at all so maybe im not the problem here.
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too many people, either born and raised in YA or self declared loathers of the distinction, think writing for adults is stringing together empty pretty (allegedly; derogatory) prose and i’m sick of it. this was a whole lot of nothing. the poetry that was inserted made it worse and the audio narration shows how off the meter is.
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Nope.
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wtf was this and where was the "garden"???
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I usually never even consider touching a book rated only 2 stars here on Goodreads, so this was an interesting experience for me. A novelty.
Would I agree with all the other negative reviews or not?
In short: I did. And then some!
I actually find it hilarious how some people call the repetitive sections in this short story "~poetry~".
Like... No, guys! It's not even close to being worth being called poetry!
It's just repetitions.
A cheap writing trick, overused and abused, to a level that (considering the shortness of the work) is beyond absurd.
Normally my own favourite thing to compare bad stories with is something written by an average highschooler. But this is actually a lot worse. A sort of storytelling that makes me think of a pre-teen trying to sound important and just ending up sounding obnoxious.
To think this short story is written for an adult audience makes no sense to me, what so ever.
When looking past the execution of the writing: Neither does the actual content.
Why is this story even in this collection? It has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
It's just an asinine conversation going on between two random people until the MC (perhaps) reaches her destination. A destination you, the reader/listener, won't ever see or experience.
Was there any fantasy in this story?
Nope!
A notebook is supposedly "cursed", but you'll never know if it is or isn't.
You won't know about the "garden" either. Not what it actually is. What it means. Why it matters. Not one thing.
I join the group of people, tearing this story to pieces with a disgruntled review, without blinking, because, seriously... How was this story even published...? -
Maybe 1 star is too low, but the poetry did not appeal to me, what could be the most interesting parts of the story were left out, and it was just bland.
Oh, and very cringey poetry that gave me second-hand embarrassment. I think the author tried to make this deep, but shoved so many platitudes into this that it just didn't end up working in her favour. -
Beautiful writing!
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Just no.
