This book... well, it had a lot of potential! Rakhee is a young Indian-American whose parents are having marital problems. One summer Rakhee and her mother go back to Kerala to stay with her mother's family; while there, Rakhee discovers a mysterious garden hidden in the nearby forest and a young girl living there who claims never to have left the garden. No prizes for guessing that the girl's origin is tied up with Rakhee's family. Eventually the family history – involving teen pregnancies, blackmail, mental illness, affairs, suicide, arranged marriages, incest, and more – is revealed, and Rahkee's life is ~altered forever~.The problem with having a child narrator is that the reader generally figures things out much more quickly than the character, especially when it's anything to do with sex or relationships. Sometimes that can lead to interesting uses of dramatic irony. Sometimes it's just boring. The Girl in the Garden is the second one. It was also melodramatic to the point of ridiculousness, and never seemed to quite decide if it wanted to follow fairy tale logic (I mean SERIOUSLY, a little girl living on her own in a garden with her pet albino peacock?) or be more realistic. Instead it tries to do both and ends up muddled somewhere in between. This was a well written and fascinating story of family secrets and discoveries. The author said "The idea for the book grew out of a single image I saw in a dream, which was of a tree with branches covered in red flowers and of two little girls huddling under the tree and the petals of the flowers showering down around them".The author's favorite book growing up was "The Secret Garden" ( by Frances Hodgson Burnett ) so with thoughts of that and tales told to her, on her, childhood visits to India, about a well in a green field near the remnants of a stone wall which was said to be haunted by a yekshi - (a ghost) the story emerges.Rakhee, the main character, experiences a summer she will never forget, and neither in my opinion, the reader.
What do You think about Una Casa Di Petali Rossi (2012)?
Absorbing story, very well written with enough intrigue to hold your interest to the end.
—vetran
Excellent read. Some hard stuff in this one but a happy ending.
—Donna
This books should totally be made into a movie. It's amazing.
—hungergames
