Rating: 
Summary: my review
Review: A woman is faced with a decision so crucial it will affect the rest of her life: she will exchange her baby for another one. She lives to pay the price of her decision.Everything in this book works very well together to make it a good book to read: the plot is interesting till the very end, the characters are very well presented and the writing is the author's best. I started reading Eileen Goudge's books recently and I really enjoyed this one. Till the very end, I could not predict the outcome. Good book, and very good and interesting reading.
Rating:
Summary: my review
Review: A woman is faced with a decision so crucial it will affect the rest of her life: she will exchange her baby for another one. She lives to pay the price of her decision. Everything in this book works very well together to make it a good book to read: the plot is interesting till the very end, the characters are very well presented and the writing is the author's best. I started reading Eileen Goudge's books recently and I really enjoyed this one. Till the very end, I could not predict the outcome. Good book, and very good and interesting reading.
Rating: 
Summary: A story of true love
Review: Although I find it extremely implausible that two women switched at birth would somehow miraculously find and fall in love with the same man a half world apart, that is the wonderful thing about fiction you get lost in...it's like a soap opera, you never admit to watching one, but you know you're addicted! It's the Danielle Steele phenomenon. This story is just perfect; Rose and Rachel are knowingly switched at birth after a tragedy in the hospital where they are born. Rose grows up in a poor, strict, catholic home and is in love with her neighboring boyfriend Brian. Rachel is raised in opulence, becomes a doctor and after finding out she can never have children, volunteers to serve in Vietnam. There she meets Brian and they fall in love. The scene where Rose finds out that Brian and Rachel have gotten married just breaks my heart, and anyone who has ever been dumped out of the blue will have tears in their eyes, I promise. Years later, Brian and Rose come face to face and it is evident that Rose has never gotten over him. I got this book when it was originally published 10 years ago and have read it several times.
Rating:
Summary: great story!
Review: and not just for women, either! . . . lots of twists and turns that keeps you wanting to see how story ends . . . sometimes, just a bit too wordy, but that is author's style . . . and it did keep my attention!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent work of literary art.
Review: As always, Eileen Goudge has written a superb tale of the
lives of two young ladies growing up in very different worlds.
A web of intrigue that parrells the lives of both girls, leaves
the reader wanting more. A true work of literature that should
be an inspiration to all aspiring young writers.
Rating:
Summary: Positively Riveting and Heartbreaking
Review: Eileen Goudge's Garden of Lies in my opinion is no light read and certainly no escape. It is a riveting, heartbreaking and thought provoking page turner. It does have some incredible and improbable turn of events, but hey, that's what makes a book a great read, is it not? I cried, blushed, cringed, ached, and dreamed with the heroes and the heroines of the novel. While appreciating the delicious and exquisite love that develops between Rachel and Brian, it was a torture for me to read through it and impossible to enjoy. You will have to read it to find out why. What a book! Filled with all implications of love of every kind. Love stolen, love taken, love given, love lost, love unfullfiled, love unrequited... it still breaks my heart. Ultimately, we get a glimpse of an answer to all the "whys?" in Rose's reflection: "And now I understand. How the winds of change can blow. How events can be bigger, stronger than we are. And even how you can love more than one person, each love with its own subtle shadings, one maybe stronger but now necessarily canceling out the other." It is not about what one deserves. None of us deserve more nor less than any other. Perhaps we deserve nothing. Love is a gift. Some receive, some do not, by forces greater than us. Only if it were true that it is better to give than receive. Thanks to Eileen for your insight into love and life.
Rating:
Summary: Positively Riveting and Heartbreaking
Review: Eileen Goudge's Garden of Lies in my opinion is no light read and certainly no escape. It is a riveting, heartbreaking and thought provoking page turner. It does have some incredible and improbable turn of events, but hey, that's what makes a book a great read, is it not? I cried, blushed, cringed, ached, and dreamed with the heroes and the heroines of the novel. While appreciating the delicious and exquisite love that develops between Rachel and Brian, it was a torture for me to read through it and impossible to enjoy. You will have to read it to find out why. What a book! Filled with all implications of love of every kind. Love stolen, love taken, love given, love lost, love unfullfiled, love unrequited... it still breaks my heart. Ultimately, we get a glimpse of an answer to all the "whys?" in Rose's reflection: "And now I understand. How the winds of change can blow. How events can be bigger, stronger than we are. And even how you can love more than one person, each love with its own subtle shadings, one maybe stronger but now necessarily canceling out the other." It is not about what one deserves. None of us deserve more nor less than any other. Perhaps we deserve nothing. Love is a gift. Some receive, some do not, by forces greater than us. Only if it were true that it is better to give than receive. Thanks to Eileen for your insight into love and life.
Rating:
Summary: Most fun I've had with a romance novel in twenty years.
Review: Eileen Goudge, Garden of Lies (Signet, 1989) This book was, upon its release, not just a sensation; it posted numbers that scandalized the publishing world. How on earth could a romance, of all things, sell like this? Almost fifteen years in the future, we can look back and snicker at our naïveté, of course. The last piece of the genre fiction puzzle gained respectability, and now Danielle Steel, Sandra Brown, and Nora Roberts sit atop the bestseller lists as comfortably as do King, Clancy, and Grisham. Steel was already on the brink of megastardom (and was, of course, a megastar in the romance world long beforehand), but most, if not all, other romance writers owe a great deal of their present respect in the world of modern literature to Eileen Goudge's debut novel. Garden of Lies is the torrid tale of two girls switched at birth. After one's mother dies in a hospital fire, Sylvie, the mother of the other, switches the two babies in order to prevent her spouse from realizing her actual daughter is the product of an affair. The two girls, Rose (Sylvie's natural daughter) and Rachel (Sylvie's 'adopted' daughter), lead oddly parallel lives despite their vast gulfs in economic and social status. Through a series of coincidences, the two both end up in love with the same man, and the close ties both have to him threaten to reveal Sylvie's long-held secret. The first thing to say about this novel, as any romance novel, is to benchmark it against the doyenne. And Garden of Lies is so much better than the works of Danielle Steel that they may as well not be on the same planet. Aside from the proofreading (I've never yet encountered a Danielle Steel novel that looks as if it had been proofread at all), Goudge seems to have turned her back on the cookie-cutter philosophy of genre fiction (simply stated, 'create character who fits plot, insert here'). Not that you haven't seen this plot and these characters before, but unlike most straight genre fiction, Goudge's characters are three-dimensional, they react to the plot as if they were actually reacting to it instead of doing what thousands of cookie-cutter characters have done before them, and when they emote, they're not giving us dialogue straight out of the pages of the scripts for The Guiding Light. Refreshing, to say the least. This epic (and really, when a romance novel goes over 500 pages, it's acceptable to call it an epic, no?) has a whole lot going for it. It's probably best to have your suspension-of-disbelief mode set pretty high; there are a few 'okay, that's too coincidental' events, and the whole stretch that takes place in Vietnam is too pat. But by the time you hit either of the above, the novel is barrel-racing along too fast for you to stop and compare Goudge's jungle to, say, Lucius Shepard's, you only have time to hang on and enjoy the ride. A rollercoaster ain't a rocket, either, but it's still fun. Garden of Lies has rightly carved itself a place in the history of the modern romance novel. Probably the best of the bunch I've encountered since the glory days of Stephanie Blake in the early eighties. Definitely worth your time if you're looking for a good, easy summer read. *** ½
Rating:
Summary: Garden of Lies
Review: Excellent book, fast summer read. I couldn't put it down and even purchased the sequel before I finished the first book. Eileen Goudge is definately a new favorite author of mine. Must read.
Rating:
Summary: Garden of Lies
Review: Excellent book, fast summer read. I couldn't put it down and even purchased the sequel before I finished the first book. Eileen Goudge is definately a new favorite author of mine. Must read.
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