Review: The China Garden

Reading Liz Berry's novel The China Garden was a pleasant visit to 12-year-old me's taste in books. I loved fantasy novels set in modern times (preferably in Britain) but full of mythology and literature. I wrote them, too, or attempted to do so. The China Garden is exactly this kind of book, though it doesn't suffer for being something I used to read. It's a genre I still enjoy.

Clare Meredith is a 17-year-old Londoner, just finished with her A-levels, when her mother announces she's moving to an old estate in Somerset, called Ravensmere, to take care of an old man. Clare insists on coming along, though she isn't sure why she wants to. She soon discovers that she is totally unaware of much of her mother's past, and when she gets to Ravensmere everyone seems to know who she is before they're told. There's a locked up Chinese garden, a missing maze, and a cat whose name Clare knows instinctively. Obviously, everyone knows something she doesn't, and it's something about her. Naturally, she's going to find out.

The book was catalogued in the normal fiction section, but I think it ought to have been in young adult fiction. It's written in that style common to a lot of young adult fiction, with slightly vague description, and plot that would have been spread (to advantage) throughout twice the pages in an adult novel. The beginning of the novel, which takes place in London, sort of felt like it had been written by someone who'd never been there--you couldn't feel the London-ness of it. Ravensmere was a bit better, since it's an invented place (and they had a map), but description remained sort of unevocative, though I had no trouble actually picturing things if I thought about it. Still, the writing was serviceable, and this kind of story is driven by the plot anyway. The characters had very satisfactory arcs, and the clues to the mystery of Ravensmere were well-laid. I knew when things were going to be relevant, but I never figured anything much out before the characters. I loved reading all the dashes of history and invented history, and the fantasy crept in gradually and unobtrusively. This is a very good summer book, and one definitely needs some fantasy once in a while.

Library adventures

It's been quite a while since I went to the library and brought home a stack of books to read. After finishing The Post-Office Girl, though, I was a bit at a loss, and felt the need for a novel to just sit down and read through. Most of the books on my to-read stack at home are nonfiction, somehow. Whenever I go to the library without a specific book in mind, I like to pick several, on the theory that at least one will catch my immediate fancy.I wanted a novel that wouldn't be a lot of work, maybe with a bit of romance. I have a vague notion that The China Garden, by Liz Berry, was on my to-read list, but it doesn't appear to be there. It's about an old English country estate, which seems exactly the thing to suit my present tastes. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor, is one I've been meaning to read since I saw the film, and though it's not quite the kind of book I want at the moment, it's the kind of book I may well want once I've satisfied my desire for fluff (respectable, well-written fluff, but still fluff). I've been meaning to read Georgette Heyer for a while, and her Regency settings fit well into my recent Jane Austen kick. Black Sheep, which is the book I settled on to begin reading, is perfectly lovely, and exactly what I want at the moment. And then I thought I'd like to read some more Neil Gaiman, so I found Interworld, which was co-written with Michael Reaves, as it was the only one to be immediately had.

There's something so satisfying about about a stack of library books.