The Girls in the Garden: A Novel, by Lisa Jewell

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The Girls in the Garden is a quick read that I would certainly recommend to others. The writing is solid. The story is good. The characters are unique. So, unique that they are the type of characters you will think about when the novel ends. My only grievance is some uppance needed to come, but it didn’t – I like Karma to get her some. ?In this case, I even found that excusable because of the age of the characters involved.

Jewell does an excellent job of immediately engaging the reader so that after the prologue you are really looking at every character to figure out who is the garden perv. The mystery deepens due to the fact that what occurs echoes of a similar crime that occurred in the garden twenty years prior, with many of the same residents.

The catalyst of the story is the arrival of a new family. This family is unique in their reasons for moving to the garden and seeing how they meet and engage with the current residents unfolds the quirks of joining a close-knit neighborhood whose occupants have current relationships and loads of history. The characters run the gamut of a creepy one-legged man, an eccentric elderly woman who walks a rabbit on a leash and sees a little bit of everything, modern day hippie parents homeschooling their free range daughters, neglected children left to their own devices to figure out the ins and outs of social norms, and schizophrenic breaks that really light the story up.

All in all, an enjoyable read.

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