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The Wonder Garden
by Lauren Acampora
Hardcover : 368 pages
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Introduction
A man strikes an under-the-table deal with a surgeon to spend a few quiet seconds closer to his wife than he's ever been; a young soon-to-be mother looks on in paralyzing astonishment as her husband walks away from a twenty-year career in advertising at the urging of his spirit animal; an elderly artist risks more than he knows when he's commissioned by his newly-arrived neighbors to produce the work of a lifetime.
In her stunning debut collection, The Wonder Garden, Lauren Acampora brings to the page with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These linked stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, incisive tales that reveal at each turn the unseen battles we play out behind drawn blinds, the creeping truths from which we distract ourselves, and the massive dreams we haul quietly with us and hold close.
Deliciously creepy and masterfully complex The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.
Editorial Review
An Amazon Best Book of May 2015: Lauren Acampora’s debut novel is a series of linked stories set in the affluent suburbs. The characters in one story might turn up in one farther along in the book, but each story stands on its own—taken as a complete novel, The Wonder Garden has an alchemical effect that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Working with precise language and metaphor, she peels back the suburban veneer, highlighting our wants and our weirdness, taking characters that might seem stock if you saw them in the local Whole Foods and drawing out their individual eccentricities. It is inevitable that some will generalize Acampora’s novel as dark or even weird, and some of the individual stories are; she is working in the same milieu as Cheever, examining how relationships are tested by the particular pace and expectations of suburbia, and exploring the unique individual’s relationship to a place that, on the surface, demands homogeneity. Her characters are far from normal, even if they exist in a world that seems that way. But maybe that is normal. This is a wonderful debut by a striking talent. --Chris Schluep
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