Review: Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Claire lives alone in the old Waverley house in Bascom, North Carolina. She doesn't want anyone else to invade her house, or her life, because people who do always leave her. 

Her mother Lorelei abandoned Claire and her sister Sydney, but not before she'd spent six years on the road with Claire, shoplifting, stealing from the men she slept with, and moving on whenever trouble threatened. When she was expecting Sydney, Lorelei returned to Bascom, but after Sydney's birth she headed off, leaving both girls in the care of their grandmother.  Lorelei never returned; she died in a car crash in Chattanooga. 

Then, after High School, Sydney left, and Claire hasn't heard from her for years. Their grandmother has died, and the only person Claire lets into her life is 79 year old Evanelle, a distant cousin. Claire runs a catering business from home, and spends most of her spare time - and many of her nights - tending the gated garden of the house. 

So far, so normal. But Claire has special powers, just like most of the Waverley women who've come before her. She can change people's moods and ideas by giving them certain plants - flowers and herbs - in the wonderful dishes she makes;

'She was the first in three generations to share this gift....Waverleys, for all their blindness to their own way of living, were extremely accurate in helping other people to see'

Once a year she makes one bottle of rose geranium wine, which is said to signal a return to happiness in the drinker. In between, she concocts casseroles with snapdragon seeds to ward off the influences of others, muffins decorated with bachelors' button flowers to help people find things, honeysuckle wine for seeing in the dark. 

And Evanelle, also a Waverley, has her own special power. She knows when she needs to give something to somebody. So she runs around town pressing everything from dimes to mango splitters on all and sundry, and hey presto! It soon transpires that whatever she gives them is exactly what they needed. 

Even the Waverley house has a life of its own. If things aren't going well, pans clatter on the kitchen walls, doorknobs seem to change sides...and as for the garden, it is home to a very peculiar apple tree, one that yearns to join in with family life, and spends a lot of its time throwing apples at people. The Waverleys know not to eat any of the apples; anyone that does will see what the most important event in their lives is going to be, be it good or bad. For some, it foretells their death. So every time apples fall down, Claire has to pick them up and bury them beside the tree's roots. 

Then one day three people turn up. 

A new next door neighbour, Tyler, who's an artist and - surprise! - a total hunk. And at the very same time, Sydney and her daughter Bay (named after her birthplace of San Francisco.) Sydney and Bay are running from something, or someone, but Sydney isn't about to tell Claire, or anyone else, what that is. 

And so the story moves along in a fairly predictable way. Tyler immediately falls in love with the resistant, prickly Claire. Sydney meets up with her college sweetheart, Hunter John Matteson, now married to Emma, scion of a super wealthy local family. Emma's mother Ariel was always determined that Hunter should ditch Sydney and marry Emma, and she was devious enough to get her way. 

Now Emma is furious, and terrified that Hunter will reunite with Sydney. Meanwhile Henry, who's loved Sydney since their schooldays, reappears. Sydney sees him as just a friend. And Fred, owner of he local farmers' market store, is devastated when his long term partner James leaves him. How can he win James back? Will Claire's rose geranium wine do the trick? 

There are some interesting themes in this book, not least the way in which we all have our own interpretations of the past, and these may well be inaccurate. We see only what we want to see, and often don't have the full facts in our possession. We protect ourselves by running away, or by staying put and closing the gate on our feelings. We avoid making decisions in case we make the wrong ones. We hold on to secrets and fears because we are too frightened to let them go. We don't say what we mean because we fear rejection. 

Some of the characters in Garden Spells are interesting; Emma, in particular, is far more insecure than people (especially Sydney, and also Hunter) think. She has learned from her appalling mother that the only way to keep a man is to shower him with almost non stop sex (this leads to one of the more entertaining scenes in the book, when Emma wholly misjudges a situation and ends up in a very embarrassing position.) Fred, the bereft store owner, doesn't know how to make even the tiniest decision without asking James, a failing that in the end drives James away. He has to learn to trust himself. 

When I started this book, I thought it would be the magical aspects that would irritate me. How can a tree express emotions? How can a doorknob change sides? 

What surprised me was that I could accept all of this in the spirit of the book; it's well written and the magic just seems to flow with the story.

But what drove me absolutely mad were the romantic plot lines, especially Tyler's. His obsession with Claire seems to come straight out of nowhere. She's not nice to him - in fact quite the opposite - but this man , whose only attributes seem to be his looks, his eligibility and his willingness to settle down, (we literally learn nothing else about him), keeps on pressing his suit. I get that love is a mystery to us all, but this infatuation was, for me, utterly unconvincing, as was Claire's eventual realisation that he's the one for her. Why?

What's more, I would so much have preferred Claire first to learn how to live without recourse to a man. Surely in the 21st century a woman can find herself and let go of her hang ups by some other means? Tyler strolls in like a fairy tale prince and within a couple of weeks Claire is so over all that's gone before, and so sold on him, that her entire life is now perfect.  Far too many of the women in this book are victims who only seem to be empowered by a new man. What happened to feminism? If they're not being victims they're using their wholly domestic powers - even Bay has apparently got the 'gift' of knowing where everything goes, eg forks in a drawer. Could she not know something that might make her future more interesting than tidying up the kitchen?

Thankfully, Sydney and Emma's stories are a bit more convincing, but the Claire/Tyler romance is at the centre of the story, and to me it ruins an otherwise enjoyable light read. I know many people love this book, but it wasn't for me.

I read Garden Spells for prompt no. 5 of the 52 Book Club 2024 Challenge 'magical realism' - so at least I can tick that one off. 

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen is published by Hodder and Stoughton. I borrowed my copy from Culter Library.