Reviews

Garden of Earthly Bodies by Sally Oliver

annamgane's review

tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

Garden of earthly bodies seems very interesting on the surface. Ideas of psychology, loss and grief pieced with the horror adjacent premise drew me in. However the format of switching between the two periods in main characters life often hindered the flow and unraveling of the story. I spent most of this book trying to figure out what the personality of the main character was. There are a few odd moments for me, like when homeless people are mentioned, that feel out of place. It seems like the novel ultimately takes an anti research psychology stance while name dropping lacan and Freud which is disappointing.

The highlights of this book for me was the overall idea of having roots in our backs. The author articulated well the experience of this illness, and made an effort to tie in the physical health with the mental. Sally Oliver is a good writer, clearly demonstrating a lot of skill but it felt like the story beats and characters needed fine tuning.

laurenhochschild's review

Another one, maybe i’ll try to finish it later but just picked starting other books over continuing this one

ajt_99's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Started reading: January 9th, 2024
Finished reading: January 25th, 2024

THE GOOD STUFF:

•  The prose: Sally Oliver's writing style is very descriptive, which may be a turn-off for some, and while it struck me as overblown at times, she manages to capture a lot of beauty, sadness, and visceral discomfort in her prose.
• The narrative ideas:  The central ideas and mysteries at the heart of the book, namely the hairs growing out of main character Marianne's back, the connections they have to her past trauma, and the secrets of Nede, the mysterious retreat compound she visits for treatment, all compelling and novel in concept, although it could be argued they falter a bit in actual execution (more on that later).
• The roots of grief: This book is, if nothing else, a reflection on grief and the effects it has on us, both mental and physical. The ways in which Oliver writes about grief and the unorthodox concepts and ideas she uses to explore the nature of grief are really interesting and impactful. She is very good at pulling you into the characters' depths of sadness and pain, which has the unfortunate side effect of making you feel like shit for the majority of the book, but I didn't really expect anything different based on the novel's description.

THE NOT-AS-GOOD STUFF:

• The characters: This novel takes place entirely from the perspective of Marianne, save for the prologue, and she herself is a fine protagonist, but unfortunately I cannot say many of the other characters are of similar quality. The other members of her family, especially her sister Marie, were well-rounded, but I found every single other character to be very flat. It was also very strange and irritating that the two characters who get the most pagetime are named Marianne and Marie, the former of which is sometimes called Mari. Richard, Marianne's boyfriend and the character who probably gets the most focus outside of Marianne and her family, was quite generic, without much of a defined personality. The characters we meet when Marianne arrives to Nede had the potential to be interesting, especially the psychologist, but the story did not give them enough time to fully develop, which leads me into...
• The pacing & the nonlinear storytelling: These were the big killers of this novel for me. These alone probably dopped this down a whole star rating than it otherwise could have been. The story jumps back and forth between past and present with each chapter, but each chapter is so long that whenever a switch happens, any accumulated narrative 'steam' is quickly quelled. The present narrative deals with Marianne's struggles with her feelings of grief and the strange hairs growing out of her after the death of Marie, as well as her journey upon entering Nede later in the book. Meanwhile, the past narrative looks at Marianne and Marie's lives leading up to the latter's battle with cancer and subsequent death by suicide. The past narrative, while extremely sad and unfortunately realistic, is nonetheless boring compared to the present narrative, which I did actually find was able to keep my interest enough to keep me pushing through the book. But yet, because of all the time given to the past narrative, Marianne's time at Nede, which was far and away the most fascinating, tense, and revelatory part of the story, felt far too short and underdeveloped. I was left wanting so much more, and definitely not in a good way.

Overall verdict: Like another reviewer I saw on here, I picked up this book as a 'mystery book' at Strand Bookstore while on a trip to NYC, and the paper wrapping hiding it advertised it as 'spine-tingling horror'. While I appreciate the wordplay, it would be a definite stretch to call this horror at all. After reading for a bit and realizing that fact, I reset my expectations to think of it more as a sad sci-fi thriller. Sadly, the book still faltered both in providing thrills and being a compelling read. Like I said, the concept of this novel is very interesting, and lends an edge of wickedly invasive body horror to the story. However, the narrative's constant temporal shifts to show narratively important but wholly uninteresting past events and bland supporting characters drained a lot of that interest. Furthermore, when the section of the story that seemed like it actually wanted to expand on and explore more facets of the central concept finally began, the book was nearly over and it came to an end without fully delivering in my opinion. This novel may have began as a flowering bud of gripping ideas, but it eventually sprouted into a tangled mess of poor pacing and plotting. There is evident quality here, and other people have seemed to resonate more with this book than me, but I found myself unable to connect with this one in the ways I think the author intended.

jayadevi's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual content, Blood, Cancer, and Body horror

ubisunt's review

dark mysterious sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

honeyzeus's review

1.0

well… lets start by saying i think there is a good sentiment in this book. however it was a little lost in the time jumps and randomness of it all. i would advise not to name two main characters ‘marianne’ and ‘marie’ and then nicknaming one ‘mari’. took me about 100 pages to figure out who was who. eric was not a solid character. just thrown in the last 1/4 of the book and served barely any purpose. i dont know… just didnt do it for me.

chloe_sinclair's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

This book had so much potential and I really wanted to love it! Although the prose was beautiful, the pacing was way off and the story just felt very unbalanced and underdeveloped.

colorfulleo92's review

3.0

The story just didn't "hit" in a way I expected. Maybe I had to high expectations. But just couldn't get intvested in the plot nor characters enough to effect me in anyway

lodenfarrier's review against another edition

3.25

Amazing concept, inconsistent execution. I often found Marianne’s introspection to be distracting. I felt we were too frequently bombarded by abstract thoughts and unrealistic musings that took us out of the scene. Those lines would have hit harder if they were far fewer. I would have preferred a stronger emphasis on the the traumatic incident, the ‘hairs’, and the retreat. I loved those scenes, and wanted more of the hectic and sinister atmosphere we got towards the end.

fayewednesday's review

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I picked this up as a blind date with a book at the Strand. It said "spine-tingling horror" for the description and once you know this book deals with hairs growing out of the spine, you see their play on words.

This author has a very heavy, descriptive style of writing, of which I wasn't always a fan. It felt often like she was grasping for every bit of meaning she could wring out of each scenario or moment. Almost like she was trying to be very philosophical in a way that wasn't quite realized. It felt very clunky at times. However, I did think there some beautiful passages in this book and the story was generally compelling. There were some parts that made me feel quite squeamish, but overall, I would say this is "horror-lite". 

This book, at it's heart, is about grief and consciousness. I'm still not quite sure I fully got where the author was going with her overall message to the reader. We get a large amount of information towards the end delivered in a way I found a bit too convenient for the plot, but that helps the reader to finally start to put the pieces together more clearly.

Reflecting upon it further, I think it's about the possibility of alleviating the strong sense of ego, and grief, via the transmission of the consciousness into the earth/a tree, these entities having a much larger and more stable consciousness than ourselves, rooted outside themselves. There's much more here that the author is trying to get at regarding consciousness and what lies in the space between consciousness and unconscious, but again, I feel somewhat in the dark

. 

Quotes:

• Pg. 138 - "She could understand why there was such a practice as 'forest bathing.' It really felt as though the shadow between the trees, briefly broken up by flashes of light through the canopy, could be reasonably absorbed in the blood stream."
• Pg. 161 - "She [the doctor] saw Marianne as the hypocrite she was, someone who hadn't lived long enough to understand the mathematics of pain. How long it took for grief to outlive itself. That time made a mockery of unrelenting pessimism. And there was a measure of dishonesty in defeat, especially if one's life was not seriously compromised by anything. Marianne pitied herself but at the same time, she knew she was safe. She was unconsciously glad to be alive."
• Pg. 169 - regarding her parents' marriage "Perhaps they should have parted years ago and saved one another the stagnation of living half in fear and half in bitterness, longing for what lay beyond one another but too weary to explore new terrain."
• Pg. 182 - "The key was not to care very much at all so that happiness might be stumbled upon, not seized and, inevitably, lost."
• Pg. 188 - regarding her boss "When she shook Marianne's hand and Rosalie happened to step out of view for a moment, Anna actually rolled her eyes. Marianne was immediately wary of this collusion that privileged her at the expense of another's status."

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Suicide