A Garden Inclosed

Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing with a surprise ending
Review: I actually enjoyed the unique style of writing by Mr. Harris. It is written almost entirely in dialogue. The book is
creatively and excellently written. The story is easy to follow,
and it is certainly a page-turner.

Excellent!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing with a surprise ending
Review: I actually enjoyed the unique style of writing by Mr. Harris. It is written almost entirely in dialogue. The book is
creatively and excellently written. The story is easy to follow,
and it is certainly a page-turner.

Excellent!

Rating:
Summary: A detective story like no other
Review: This is a book just waiting to be discovered.

It tells the story of Ellis, a white novelist and writing professor, and his light-skinned African-American wife, Rosa, who is a geneticist. Both come from the pre-Civil Rights era South, during a time when race relations were even more precarious than they are today. The defining event in Rosa and Ellis' life is the tragic loss of their only son, Joey, who died of an extremely rare disease known as Alexander Disease when he was very young. While Rosa has decided it best to leave the mystery of Joey's contraction of the rare disease behind her in an attempt to move on, Ellis continues to obsess over solving the why's and how's of Joey's demise. This is the premise of the "detective story" this novel presents. But it is a detective story like no other because of the unorthodox tools the characters use to solve the mystery at hand. Once Ellis convinces Rosa to "reopen Joey's case file," so to speak, these two "detectives" take two totally different approaches to "cracking the case." Ellis uses the technique of "novelizing," or imaginatively reconstructing the past through probable story lines - the very technique he uses as a fiction writer - only, this time the characters he uses are not from his imagination, but from he and Rosa's own family trees, whose blanks he is able to fill in through extensive genealogical research. Rosa, on the other hand, uses her skills as a geneticist to corroborate Ellis' imagination-based findings with science-based findings of her own. The search brings the husband and wife nearer to each other than they have been in years, and nearer to the truth than ever. But the truth is a deadly secret that could tear their lives apart.

The events of the story are fascinating, and Harris does a wonderful job of building suspense and piquing the reader's interest before the close of each chapter. This is a novel that builds and builds and keeps getting progressively better as it goes along. New revelations heap themselves upon one another and create a tremendous momentum as the reader makes his way through the book. And let's just say there's a twist at the end. A huge twist that puts the entire novel in perspective the way a well-executed twist always does.

Getting there is fun. The format of the novel makes it a breeze to read. It's told in dialogue form, as a dialogue between Ellis and Rosa, but with no tag markings (i.e. quotation marks or "he said"'s), so that each line represents a character's exact speech and the next line will be the next character's speech. It's amazing how Harris managed to tell a whole story this way without it becoming redundant or boring. The risky technique actually enlivens the story and makes it extremely cinematic. Of course, Harris isn't afraid to break from this format, and in my personal favorite chapter, he takes on the first-person voice of Rosa's mother, an African-American woman who has lived through struggle but managed to keep her religious faith intact all her life. The way Harris captures her voice is otherworldly and the information this character reveals continues to propel the story along.

All in all, I highly recommend this rarity of modern fiction: a novel that is actually "novel" in terms of the story it tells and the way the author chooses to tell it. Give it a read, I promise you won't be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: A detective story like no other
Review: This is a book just waiting to be discovered.

It tells the story of Ellis, a white novelist and writing professor, and his light-skinned African-American wife, Rosa, who is a geneticist. Both come from the pre-Civil Rights era South, during a time when race relations were even more precarious than they are today. The defining event in Rosa and Ellis' life is the tragic loss of their only son, Joey, who died of an extremely rare disease known as Alexander Disease when he was very young. While Rosa has decided it best to leave the mystery of Joey's contraction of the rare disease behind her in an attempt to move on, Ellis continues to obsess over solving the why's and how's of Joey's demise. This is the premise of the "detective story" this novel presents. But it is a detective story like no other because of the unorthodox tools the characters use to solve the mystery at hand. Once Ellis convinces Rosa to "reopen Joey's case file," so to speak, these two "detectives" take two totally different approaches to "cracking the case." Ellis uses the technique of "novelizing," or imaginatively reconstructing the past through probable story lines - the very technique he uses as a fiction writer - only, this time the characters he uses are not from his imagination, but from he and Rosa's own family trees, whose blanks he is able to fill in through extensive genealogical research. Rosa, on the other hand, uses her skills as a geneticist to corroborate Ellis' imagination-based findings with science-based findings of her own. The search brings the husband and wife nearer to each other than they have been in years, and nearer to the truth than ever. But the truth is a deadly secret that could tear their lives apart.

The events of the story are fascinating, and Harris does a wonderful job of building suspense and piquing the reader's interest before the close of each chapter. This is a novel that builds and builds and keeps getting progressively better as it goes along. New revelations heap themselves upon one another and create a tremendous momentum as the reader makes his way through the book. And let's just say there's a twist at the end. A huge twist that puts the entire novel in perspective the way a well-executed twist always does.

Getting there is fun. The format of the novel makes it a breeze to read. It's told in dialogue form, as a dialogue between Ellis and Rosa, but with no tag markings (i.e. quotation marks or "he said"'s), so that each line represents a character's exact speech and the next line will be the next character's speech. It's amazing how Harris managed to tell a whole story this way without it becoming redundant or boring. The risky technique actually enlivens the story and makes it extremely cinematic. Of course, Harris isn't afraid to break from this format, and in my personal favorite chapter, he takes on the first-person voice of Rosa's mother, an African-American woman who has lived through struggle but managed to keep her religious faith intact all her life. The way Harris captures her voice is otherworldly and the information this character reveals continues to propel the story along.

All in all, I highly recommend this rarity of modern fiction: a novel that is actually "novel" in terms of the story it tells and the way the author chooses to tell it. Give it a read, I promise you won't be sorry.