I’m sort of puzzled how to review this book, because everything about it is a spoiler. The cover, the tagline on the cover, the back-of-the-book description – all spoilers. If you look at that picture, you can tell exactly what this book is going to be about: a garden that grows human beings. Perhaps creatures that are human/plant hybrids. Then the back of the book tells you every other main plot point of the book. Which would be fine, except that in the climax, all the “secrets” are revealed as if they were meant to be secret. This seems like bad marketing to me and makes me feel really sorry for the author. I know this is by no means her fault. She doesn’t control marketing.

My friend Brittany got an ARC of this book at TLA this year. She brought it and a couple others over to my house, thinking I might enjoy them. I honestly thought this would be the one I’d be least interested in reading, because I’m not a real big sci-fi person, but when I tried reading the first ten pages of all three of them, this is the one that caught my eyes. The plotline didn’t sound like me, but the writing was really well done. I was hooked right away.

That makes the contrast here even more difficult for me, because all the way through the last page, the writing is really, really good! I was completely wrapped up in this book, even though the secrets were less than secret for me. I liked the characters and I liked the adventure they went on. But because I knew everything in advance, the book ended up falling flat for me, which makes me sad.

I don’t know. How do you review something that you came into backwards? Maybe if I hadn’t known anything up front, I would have liked it better. The book had a strong political bent, all militant environmentalism, which isn’t my favorite thing even if I agree with some of those particular political stances. There was a bit too much heavy-handed strong-arming in The Gardener. If a novel is going to have political messages, I like them to be more subtle. But still, even with that going against it, I think the writing would have been enough to make up for the politics – if only I hadn’t known the entire plotline in advance.

I’m not sure what else to say. If you do decide to read this, please don’t read the back of the book. You can’t go in completely blind – the cover and tagline on the cover already give away several revelations – but you can go in more blind than I did and hopefully that will make this a better experience for you.