Stone Garden

Stone Garden, by Molly Moynahan, was really interesting and well-written. Alice is in shock after her fiance suddenly disappears in Mexico and she sees her world and her future go to pieces. This novel was an insightful view into the pains, anxieties and life of a grieving teenager. Alice is a fascinating character with a lot to offer to the story. She is priveleged but we are able to see the destruction and grief that cannot be helped by money or material possesions. Ms. Moynahan really grasps how emotional it would be to lose someone you had planned on staying with forever, and it shows. This book truly makes clear the importance of appreciating the people we love.

When I heard that Molly Moynahan's novel was going to be on the NYTimes list of Notable Books for the year, I immediately moved it to the top of my TBR stack and, oh, am I glad I did. Seventeen-year-old Alice McGuire finds herself in the wrong kind of wonderland when Matthew Swan, her soul mate since very early childhood, vanishes while in Mexico. While coping with the grief of a loss that never should have happened, Alice becomes involved with tutoring prisoners in writing for her senior class project. I don't want to give anything away, but this is such a strong and sensitive novel, smart and sad, the best part of it being that the reader goes away feeling as though Ms. Moynahan will have a lot more good stories to tell.

I thought this was a wonderful book. The author grabbed my attention right away and I was enthralled the whole book. I was amazed at how well the author understood the feelings and fears of the main character, a high school senior, as she had to come to terms with all the changes in her life, the loss of her best friend and the need to learn forgiveness so she could move on. I really liked all the characters, flaws and all, and I felt by the end of the book, that I wasn't ready for it to end, I wanted to know what happens to everyone! Read this book, I don't think you will be disappointed.

In an industry that probably presses out a book (or two) a minute, so-called "new voices" are a dime a dozen. New voices with original, well-written stories are not nearly as abundant. And that's why STONE GARDEN by Molly Moynahan is such a literary treat. Moynahan is a new voice that knows how to tell a story.STONE GARDEN is the poignant tale of not just the untimely death of a life only begun, but also the unsettling effect that death has on the fragile life left behind. At book's start, 17-year-old Matthew Swan is dead. Alice, his best friend for over a decade and once-believed future partner, is left behind to mourn, grieve and adjust to the loss. She seeks mindless, disconnected connections in a few physical encounters that leave her, and this reader, asking the unanswerable question of what it would have been like with Matthew, her silenced soul mate, her dead destiny. She seeks solace in conversations and interactions with her parents, her teachers, her friends, and even the inmates at Rahway prison, where she is teaching writing as a school project. But she doesn't find release and her pain of separation is as palpable as Romeo and Juliet's collective pain. Excuse the comparison to that most famous of first-love couples, but it was unavoidable --- it's there on every page of Moynahan's doomed romance.STONE GARDEN is ripe with surprisingly true teenage dialogue that straddles the worlds of inquisitive childhood and knowing adulthood, stepping back and forth between the two as only adolescents finding maturity and reluctantly shedding innocence can, and as only a very good writer can capture. Screaming she's "not a baby anymore," Alice mounts her pink three-speed Schwinn decorated with pink plastic streamers and takes off down the road to face solo her demons of lost love. "...Matthew Swan had held my face in his hands and told me that he loved me with every part of himself, that he had loved me from the moment he saw me trip over my shoe laces, and while it had taken a while for us to grow up and get it right, we would get it so right that never in the history of love affairs and marriages and big families with beautiful children and grandchildren would anyone get it more right," she reflected with the naïve idealism of a young person struggling with love and death for the first time.Moynahan knows teenagers, their desires and their hauntings --- and she delivers them in STONE GARDEN. But more importantly, she knows people. STONE GARDEN is more that just Alice's story. A strong cast of well-drawn characters lends even more realism to the story. Matthew's mother and siblings for that matter are 'alternative' in their thinking and appearance; their scenes are hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy, and would be laughable if not so sad in their efforts to deal with Matthew's demise. Alice's younger brother, Alf, designs clothes for fun. A teacher by trade, Moynahan's book could even be called a valentine to educators; a particularly appealing character is

This is a fascinating, insightful story set in a high school where a young man has disappeared. But don't let the high school setting fool you, this book is readable for everyone. Moynahan does a terrific job of building her characters and they walk off the pages into your heart. I cared about Alice and her family and wanted them to be happy. The reader watches Alice's transformation from a spoiled high school kid to a young woman. This will make you think about grief, happiness and family love and will make you laugh! I finished the book immediately handed to a friend and said "Read this! You'll love it." I will also be recommending it to my book club.