Rating: 
Summary: The worst book I read this summer
Review: I read numerous books this summer, all great, until I picked up this one. It was so confusing to tell which voice the author was trying to use from chapter to chapter. The author also gave the main character a fantasy world which was also difficult to disguish from her real world. There are so many other wonderfully written books out there, choose one of them before you waste your time with this one.
Rating: 
Summary: What a find...I just loved it.
Review: I simply loved this book. I just couldn't put it down. I love the writing. It is wonderful. You love the characters so very much by the end. I must say that I wanted to find the book for which the title is based, "The Gardens of Kyoto". It seems to inspire such love in the characters. I have recommended it to so many of my friends and family and have loaned it to several people who have come back with statements like, "Why would you want to make me cry?" That is the effect that it has on you. I started it on a Sunday morning and by the evening it was in the hands of another book lover. I just devoured it from beginning to end.
Rating:
Summary: What a find...I just loved it.
Review: I simply loved this book. I just couldn't put it down. I love the writing. It is wonderful. You love the characters so very much by the end. I must say that I wanted to find the book for which the title is based, "The Gardens of Kyoto". It seems to inspire such love in the characters. I have recommended it to so many of my friends and family and have loaned it to several people who have come back with statements like, "Why would you want to make me cry?" That is the effect that it has on you. I started it on a Sunday morning and by the evening it was in the hands of another book lover. I just devoured it from beginning to end.
Rating: 
Summary: Puzzling
Review: I wasn't sure how I felt about this book and was curious to see how other people perceived it. Was interested to see that people either love it or hate it. Not I. I enjoyed much of the writing but was often confused. Who's she talking to? Where is she? When is it? She brings up a question and leaves it hanging, let's us wonder for a long time about what happened to her sister, says the last time she saw Randall, but then sees him again, says she never saw Daphne again, but she does...I certainly wouldn't say it's a terrible book and I'm not sorry I read it, but I'm not sure I would reccommend it either. I agree that I'll probably think about it awhile.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely amazing.
Review: I'm an avid reader, and this book is one of the most beautiful things I've ever had the privilage to read. Both haunting and thoughtful, lyrical and down-to-earth, it manages to paint a heartbreaking story about love; both true love and love at first sight, and how the ramifications of both can affect a person for the rest of their life. The narrator spends the course of the book struggling with her love for her departed cousin and the odd love she feels towards a man who sent her letters throughout World War Two without knowing she was the recipient. The entire story is layed out as if it is being told to the narrator's daughter, and we come to find out that it is the explanation of this young mother's life and why she made the choices that brought her daughter about. Kate Walbert's writing is, in a word, wistful. This is the sort of book that it's painful to reach the end of, because by the last page you feel so deeply connected to the characters you don't want to stop hearing about them. For anyone who read and enjoyed this book, I recommend Walbert's other novel, "Where She Went" -- it is written much in the style of "Gardens", and actually has a few similar plot devices.
Rating:
Summary: Elegiac and Heart-Wrenching
Review: Kate Walbert's "The Gardens of Kyoto" is an engaging and elegantly crafted debut novel. Walbert focuses her story upon Ellen, a young girl whose constantly shifting memories and perceptions of reality threaten to tear her life apart. She narrates the interlocking stories of her long-dead cousin Randall and her short-lived romance with an emotionally wounded veteran with passion and grace. Walbert's tale concerns the raw and unhealed wounds wrought by World War II. Her focus on the war calls to mind the protagonists of Ernest Hemingway's celebrated novel, "The Sun Also Rises". Yet, while Hemingway's sympathies clearly lie with the men, Walbert expresses the sadness of the women left behind in their wake. The walking wounded that Walbert describes unintentionally destroy those who lie in their paths. It is significant that Ellen narrates her mournful story to a child she will never raise, as she forced to give up a daughter to adoption at an early age. Walbert raises many important points in her novel, perhaps the most important being that war wounds all involved: the living, the dead and the unborn.
Rating:
Summary: A sad, moving and memorable novel
Review: Like the meditation gardens in Kyoto, Japan, which is the underlying metaphor to the book (in case you couldn't guess), the story of Ellen is told with subtlety and hidden shades of meaning, which the reader is invited to visit and probe. Ellen is presumably narrating her story to her daughter. The defining event in Ellen's life is the early, barely realized love and loss of her cousin Randall, who was killed in World War II on Iwo Jima in the Pacific. It will tragically affect and color her other relationships forever, although how, is not fully revealed to the reader immediately, but discovered along the way. While Ellen is the central character, it soon becomes apparent, through other of the book's characters, that the author has a broader message in mind than Ellen's private sorrow. Slowly, we learn how war affects and sometimes ruins the people it touches. Randall ironically has a love of Japanese culture, particularly the treasured book Gardens of Kyoto, which he bequeathes to Ellen along with his diary. It is the first of many ironies which we are invited to discover, observe, and puzzle out, including glimpses of relationships rather than the relationships themselves. With deft strokes, Kate Walbert gives us just enough information to do just that, painting her landscape and weaving her story through flashbacks and flash forwards, often in a surreal or dreamlike fashion. At times one starts to lose a sense of time and place, reality and fantasy, although Walbert always manages to bring us back. As layers of secrets unfurl, the story keeps drawing us up until the very end. This is an accomplished first novel, at first impression deceptively simple, but leaving the reader with remembrances of lingering sadness and loss long after it is finished.
Rating:
Summary: A Walk in the Gardens
Review: Loved this book! It's a beautifully written novel that weaves multiple stories throughout. All are not what they may seem.......
Rating:
Summary: Very original, poignant . . .
Review: Rather than reading this book, I may have absorbed it! "The Gardens of Kyoto" is unique in plot and characterization. The tone is almost gothic, with a wonderful sense of place, as Walbert explores the cycle of lost love -- damaged men and the women who love them -- caused by war. Serious and studious Ellen falls in love with her cousin Randall, only son born to an influential judge late in his life. A lonely boy with a passion for vocabulary words, reading encyclopedias and seeing ghosts, Randall reveals his real self to Ellen, trusting her with his secrets. Raised by a woman he later learns is not his mother in a rambling farmhouse once used by the Underground Railroad to harbor escaped slaves, Randall is sent to Okinawa after WWII and dies under circumstances equally as mysterious as the rest of his life. He bequeaths Ellen his private journal and a book about the gardens of Kyoto, Japan. The book figures prominently throughout the story, the book's subject matter a haunting symbol of life. Years later, as a college student, Ellen meets a young soldier, Lt. Henry Rock. Henry falls for Ellen's troubled and indifferent friend, Daphne, and begins a correspondence. Intending the letters for Daphne, Ellen is the one who receives them and falls in love with the writer. After the war, Henry finds Ellen and begins an ill-fated relationship. The book spans the 1940's and 1950's, through World War II and the Korean War. In the book, the men who survive the wars, Roger, Ellen's brother-in-law, and Henry are "damaged", so affected by their experience that they are changed forever, unreachable by those who love them. Chapter 11 of book 5 quotes Iago, "'I am not what I am ....' We are none of us who we are." This paragraph flew out at me as soon as I read it. Everyone hides his private demons from public view. A wonderful summation of the novel. This is a starkly written novel, and perhaps it is this starkness that provokes the emotions. As I read this, I truly did hurt for Ellen and her losses. I felt Randall's isolation, Henry's disillusionment, Daphne's self-destructiveness. The minor character's, such as Randall's birth mother, Ruby, and Ellen's sisters, Rita and Betty, made brief appearances, but left big impressions. The writing and even the dust jacket are sepia-toned, but the story is so emotionally colorful that it is hard to walk away from it.
Rating:
Summary: Very original, poignant . . .
Review: Rather than reading this book, I may have absorbed it! "The Gardens of Kyoto" is unique in plot and characterization. The tone is almost gothic, with a wonderful sense of place, as Walbert explores the cycle of lost love -- damaged men and the women who love them -- caused by war. Serious and studious Ellen falls in love with her cousin Randall, only son born to an influential judge late in his life. A lonely boy with a passion for vocabulary words, reading encyclopedias and seeing ghosts, Randall reveals his real self to Ellen, trusting her with his secrets. Raised by a woman he later learns is not his mother in a rambling farmhouse once used by the Underground Railroad to harbor escaped slaves, Randall is sent to Okinawa after WWII and dies under circumstances equally as mysterious as the rest of his life. He bequeaths Ellen his private journal and a book about the gardens of Kyoto, Japan. The book figures prominently throughout the story, the book's subject matter a haunting symbol of life. Years later, as a college student, Ellen meets a young soldier, Lt. Henry Rock. Henry falls for Ellen's troubled and indifferent friend, Daphne, and begins a correspondence. Intending the letters for Daphne, Ellen is the one who receives them and falls in love with the writer. After the war, Henry finds Ellen and begins an ill-fated relationship. The book spans the 1940's and 1950's, through World War II and the Korean War. In the book, the men who survive the wars, Roger, Ellen's brother-in-law, and Henry are "damaged", so affected by their experience that they are changed forever, unreachable by those who love them. Chapter 11 of book 5 quotes Iago, "'I am not what I am ....' We are none of us who we are." This paragraph flew out at me as soon as I read it. Everyone hides his private demons from public view. A wonderful summation of the novel. This is a starkly written novel, and perhaps it is this starkness that provokes the emotions. As I read this, I truly did hurt for Ellen and her losses. I felt Randall's isolation, Henry's disillusionment, Daphne's self-destructiveness. The minor character's, such as Randall's birth mother, Ruby, and Ellen's sisters, Rita and Betty, made brief appearances, but left big impressions. The writing and even the dust jacket are sepia-toned, but the story is so emotionally colorful that it is hard to walk away from it.
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