The Garden by Tomi Champion-Adeyemi * *
This was not the most successful pick for me.
I chose this because the obvious choice for this prompt would have been The Secret Garden, and I really did not want to read The Secret Garden. So I picked The Garden, which sounded like it might be mysterious, emotional, and a bit unusual.
The story follows Lęina, a young woman whose mother disappeared when she was a child while searching for a mysterious garden in Brazil. Years later, Lęina feels drawn to that same garden. She has her mother’s journal, which is connected to the garden, and she travels to Brazil to look for the place that has been calling to her.
On paper, that sounds exactly like something I should enjoy. A missing mother. A mysterious garden. A journey to Brazil. A young woman chasing something that might be memory, grief, inheritance, or obsession. There is definitely an idea there.
The problem is that, for me, the story never really becomes enough of anything.
It also was not quite the story I expected. I thought this might be more of a journey into the rainforest, but most of it is much quieter and more conversational. It starts with Lęina meeting her guide at the airport, where she is already overwhelmed and anxious, and then most of the story unfolds through their conversations in the car, at a gas station, in places where they stay, and along the way. The forest only really comes in at the end.
The structure is basically a poem, then a conversation, then another poem, then another conversation. I think it is meant to feel profound and intimate, but I mostly found it confusing. It kept touching on big ideas, especially grief, parents, identity, loss, and the feeling of being pulled towards something you cannot properly explain. But it never stayed with any of them long enough to give them weight.
It felt like putting on a bathing suit, going to the beach, and then only dipping your toes in without ever actually swimming.
That is the feeling I had throughout the whole story. It approaches depth, but it does not enter it.
There were moments that made me pause, but not always in the intended way. At one point, Lęina asks the guide which parent he hates, and he basically says that he likes his parents. That moment stood out to me because it felt strange that she would assume everyone has one hated parent. I understand that this probably says something about her own grief and emotional damage, but the story is so short and so abstract that even moments like this feel more like passing gestures than fully developed character work.
The poems were not bad, but they also did not do much for me personally. They have a rhythmic, almost song-like quality, with repeated lines and emotional phrasing. I can see what they are trying to do. They seem to give us Lęina’s inner world more directly than the prose does. But I am not really a modern poetry person. I usually struggle with poetry unless it is more dramatic, strange, or old-fashioned. I am much more of a Byron person. Give me something like Darkness, with its bleak, apocalyptic weirdness, and I am much more interested.
So while I could see intention in the poems, I did not really connect with them emotionally.
I was also relieved to find that I was not the only person who came away puzzled. I remembered seeing this cover in a video by one of my favourite BookTubers, and she had read it too. She usually has a much more profound and layered take on books than I do, and she also did not seem to know what to make of it. That made me feel a little more confident that the problem was not just me missing something obvious.
This is very short, and that is probably its biggest advantage. It is more of a short story than a book, really, so at least it did not take much time. But even for something this brief, I wanted more substance. More shape. More reason to care. More of the garden itself.
I gave The Garden two stars. The idea had potential, and there are hints of grief, mystery, and emotional intensity, but the story never opened up for me. It stayed at the edge of something interesting, looking in, but never quite stepped through.
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