A review by fayewednesday
Garden of Earthly Bodies by Sally Oliver

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."
Expand filter menu Content Warnings