A review by ajt_99
Garden of Earthly Bodies by Sally Oliver

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.