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A review by elmtreebooks
In the Shadow Garden by Liz Parker
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
It’s cute. It’s cozy. The plot is completely reliant on the main character family of witches being deeply incurious about a hugely suspicious hole in the town’s collective memory… even though the people in town behind “memory wiping” everyone each summer are their sworn enemies, and clear and obvious villains from start to end… so the plot is thin, from start to end.
This book exists to support a clever and interesting concept — the shadow garden — and then the cleverness begins and ends with the basic pitch of the magic garden. Every plot point is completely reliant on the characters being absurdly, obstinately, unbelievably stupid.
The entirety of the magic “reveal” is clearly and explicitly laid out in Kaden’s very first chapter, so you won’t be hanging in suspense at all throughout the book as the world’s dumbest characters fumble their way to the truth very very slowly. But it’s cute. Forgettable. Fine. Good to read on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea, and then forget immediately.
I do hate the insta-love trope. And a whole town of unreliable narrators— also not great. And for some reason the MMC being named Kaden gave me such an ick, barf.
There was also this weird thing where the author would explicitly mention the race of the most minor of minor characters, like single scene one-to-zero line characters that were acting more like set dressing for the town. I don’t know what exactly it was about the way they wrote it that felt like weird tokenism to me, but just a heads up for readers.
Examples: calling out the mayor (that is not mayor anymore and has no active role in the story) as Black. Calling out that the wife of a founding family member who is a newspaper editor specifically as a “young pregnant Indian woman.” And lines like this:
“On cue, two elementary-school children--a white boy and a Black girl — ran across the stage in homemade firefly costumes, beaming as people erupted in applause.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt like the author wanted credit for explicitly including POC in the story, while simultaneously giving them the most non-role roles possible and keeping the MCs exclusively white. It’s not representation if the inclusion is a completely meaningless parenthetical for a background character.
Maybe it’s not explicitly evil; but it rubbed me the wrong way. Why are the *only* people in the whole book specifically assigned race the background non-character POC?
This book exists to support a clever and interesting concept — the shadow garden — and then the cleverness begins and ends with the basic pitch of the magic garden. Every plot point is completely reliant on the characters being absurdly, obstinately, unbelievably stupid.
The entirety of the magic “reveal” is clearly and explicitly laid out in Kaden’s very first chapter, so you won’t be hanging in suspense at all throughout the book as the world’s dumbest characters fumble their way to the truth very very slowly. But it’s cute. Forgettable. Fine. Good to read on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea, and then forget immediately.
I do hate the insta-love trope. And a whole town of unreliable narrators— also not great. And for some reason the MMC being named Kaden gave me such an ick, barf.
There was also this weird thing where the author would explicitly mention the race of the most minor of minor characters, like single scene one-to-zero line characters that were acting more like set dressing for the town. I don’t know what exactly it was about the way they wrote it that felt like weird tokenism to me, but just a heads up for readers.
Examples: calling out the mayor (that is not mayor anymore and has no active role in the story) as Black. Calling out that the wife of a founding family member who is a newspaper editor specifically as a “young pregnant Indian woman.” And lines like this:
“On cue, two elementary-school children--a white boy and a Black girl — ran across the stage in homemade firefly costumes, beaming as people erupted in applause.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt like the author wanted credit for explicitly including POC in the story, while simultaneously giving them the most non-role roles possible and keeping the MCs exclusively white. It’s not representation if the inclusion is a completely meaningless parenthetical for a background character.
Maybe it’s not explicitly evil; but it rubbed me the wrong way. Why are the *only* people in the whole book specifically assigned race the background non-character POC?
Content Warnings
Moderate: Domestic abuse