The Short of It:

Full of sorrowful, memorable characters with writing that immediately pulls you in.

The Rest of It:

The story begins in War, West Virginia and spans from 1924 to the 70′s. After a rail accident buries her home in coal, sixteen-year-old Emma is rescued by a railroad man by the name of Caleb. Shortly thereafter, the two marry and begin their life together. Caleb is a good man but prone to dreaming and when he dreams up a garden to rival that of any found in Sicily, Emma has her doubts but she goes along with it. When tragedy strikes and Emma is left to fend for herself, what we are given is only a brief glimpse of what is to come. Told in alternating chapters and ending with Emma’s granddaughter, Hannah, this is a family saga that began strong but left me wanting more.

Emma’s story was the most appealing to me. I wanted to know more about her and Caleb but when it jumped to her son Dean as an adult, I began to lose interest. Dean was not likable and his marriage to Sadie and her eventual decline in health, made me not like him even more. And when the story ended with Hannah, his daughter, I found myself even less interested. From the strong beginning, I had high hopes for this one. In the end, I enjoyed the book but not as much as I had hoped.

Had this story stuck with Emma and Caleb I think I would have liked it more. The dreamy, fantastical part of Caleb was particularly interesting against Emma’s more sensible nature. What these characters all share is a sense of longing. The type that can never be fulfilled. They seem to struggle with happiness. Both what it is and how to achieve it. Flawed as they are, the story doesn’t dwell long enough on any one aspect of their unhappiness so it steers clear of the depression you’d expect to find in a book like this. If I were to take the story out of the equation, I’d say that the writing was lovely. Lovely, without being over-the-top. The imagery and the voice of the characters came through enough for me to want to finish the book and I would absolutely read another book by Tekulve.

For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter. ( )

This is a saga that begins in 1924 in an impoverished immigrant coal-mining community in West Virginia and continues up to 1973. In each chapter the perspective changes from among the major characters, beginning with Emma when she is 16, and ending with her granddaughter Hannah at age 28.

Throughout the years we don’t get much of a view of the interior lives of these characters except for the recurring sorrow, mourning, and longing for escape that hangs over their bleak lives. The pervasive poverty and oppression of their surroundings wraps the story in a bleak cloud of melancholy.

Depressing? Yes.

Worthwhile? The writing shows the kind of skill you often see coming out of writing workshops, but it kept my emotional engagement on the surface. I was more involved in the oppressive setting than the characters themselves.

Overall Quality? This book reads to me like a series of closely connected short stories. That’s because some of the chapters, taking place as they do after gaps of several years, begin with a great deal of repetition. I could see this being the case if these chapters had been serialized in a journal or magazine, and in fact, in an afterword, the author acknowledges this is precisely what happened. But in book form, the repetitive sections should have been edited out.

Evaluation: Recommended mainly for those who have more of an appreciation for grim and somber stories about the immigrant experience. ( )

Short and Sweet Summary

Caleb Sypher takes 16 year old Emma Sypher from coal country in War, West Virginia to
47 acres of Virginia mountain farmland on a ridge above a valley called God's Thumbprint. They build a home and gardens reminiscent of the ones Caleb saw in Italy when he was there during the war and settle in to create a home and a life for themselves and their son Dean. But, life is all about what happens while you're making even the best of plans, and their lives are changed forever one day by a tramp named Bambino. For the next 50+ years, Grandfather and Grandmother Palmisano, Uncle Carlo, Father Edward,
Dean Sypher and his wife Sadie, Sadie's mother Jane Musick, Dean and Sadie's daughter Hannah, Aunt Maria, Dr. Chapel, the vet and Luther and Ruth's lives all meld together to change each other's directions and form a community of people who struggle to move into the future while holding on to the past.
A family story not to be missed.

What I Liked

The vivid descriptions of the mountains, the trees, the wildflowers, the growing gardens, the roads, the houses, the people...I loved Tekulve's rich descriptions from the first paragraph.

The generations...while Tekulve's story covers 3 generations, she writes in such a way that you don't get so attached to the characters just to have them disappear once the next generation begins. Those characters always stay with the ones they leave behind. Sadie's character, in particular, is one who through her quiet strength, deeply affects those she loved and those who loved her. These are real people, living real lives, under real circumstances, making real choices that shaped the communities they lived in and their families.

Sadie - if you make me pick a favorite character, it is Sadie. Sadie was a strong woman who weathered her life and its hardships along with its joys with her head held high. She didn't need sarcasm or bitchiness to prove her strength, and she treated others the way she believed everyone deserved to be treated. Her devotion to Dean's mother was stunning, and I couldn't help but think about the commitments these families made to each other.

The naturalness of life - these generations of people lived off the land because they had to. Today we live so far off the land it's not even funny. We have gotten so far away from enjoying and appreciating the bounties of the land around us. Tekulve reminds us of that without preaching one time. She doesn't say, "Look at the mountains in all their glory." She paints us a picture. She doesn't talk about the tomato plants as red fruit growing on a vine in our little convenient garden beds. She paints a picture of people working alongside each other, depending on their crop and making anything and everything out of those tomatoes in order to use what's been harvested...without wasting one single drop. And, of course, there are the children, who grow so tired of eating tomato sandwiches, tomato biscuits, homemade catchup, stewed tomatoes and the like that they throw tomatoes across the fence when nobody's looking. In today's society, whatever we want or need, whether it's a food product or building materials, we just go on down to the store and buy whatever we need and many times thing we don't need. I think there's a lot to these old stories worth remembering.

Strong female characters - the men worked for the railroad or in the coal mines. They were there, but they weren't really. The women ran the homes, raised the children, cooked the meals, sewed the clothes, and taught the lessons. Many times the fathers were only present on Sunday afternoons. Children learned to be strong very early...young girls had to step in for their mamas when they gave birth, were sick or if their mamas died. Survival was something Tekulve's female characters learned very early on in their lives.

I loved that Tekulve wrote some of the novel from stories that her mother-in-law told her. Why invent new, bold and beautiful stories when we have such culturally rich, in-depth characters and the events of their lives that shape them and generations to pull from?? Can you tell I loved this book??

What I Didn't Like

Dean was the only character I wanted to slap around from time to time...he realized just what a partner, wife and woman he had in Sadie after she was gone. Time wasted is always a shame.

Overall Recommendation

In the Garden of Stone is a keeper for me...it will hold a special place in the antique secretary with the other keepers. If you like real life, hard times, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps kind of stories, then this is your next read. ( )

I was interested in this book because my paternal grandmother's family were Sicilians who ended up in West Virginia and western Maryland coal country. We're a taciturn people on my father's side of the family; my wife and sister-in-law marvel at the long, drawn out conversations we have about weather -- the current weather, the past weather, the weather to come -- but for my brother and I, that's just how you communicate with those relatives.

My wife and sister-in-law, being bolder, nosier people who didn't get the memo that one talks about the weather, are unabashed questioners, a trait I've come to deeply appreciate as they've elicited some of the loveliest and surprising stories from that side of the family. Unfortunately, my grandmother passed away after she and my wife met only once, and that brief glimpse into her family's life was eye-opening and fascinating. It's one of my greatest regrets I didn't get to talk to her about more than the weather.

In some ways, this book felt like I got a chance to continue that conversation.

Spanning almost fifty years, from 1924 to 1973, this novel is a collection of vignettes following a West Virginia family. Emma, a 16-year old Sicilian immigrant, loathes her mother's joyless existence and marries impetuously. Caleb, her new husband, works for the railroads and has a generous but drifting kind of focus that emerges even more strongly in his son Dean. Tragedy forces Dean from his family's land and upon his return, his devotion to the ground, the earth, the animals, and even the people he crosses creates joy and anguish in equal part. His daughter comes of age when her immigrant Italian relatives are old and frightening and the lure of the world outside of her family's property lines calls her more than her family's link to the land.

Tekulve's writing style is pretty, poetic, but not ornate or obfuscated. Each chapter feels like a self-contained short story in many ways; together, they show the arc of a family and place, but individually, there's a brilliant, bright, or blinding moment that stings or illuminates. I got the sense that some of the pieces were composed independently of the volume: Tekulve occasionally repeats an incident or a particular turn of phrase from one story in another, as if trying to offer context to a chapter were it removed from the collection. I didn't mind the repetition as it sort of emphasized the almost fairy tale quality to the family: fatherless children, magical gardens, temptations.

The familiarity of Tekulve's characters and place resonated with me as much as the writing. She articulated the nuances of rural poverty that felt authentic rather than shocking or exploitative. In her description of the Sypher family property, with the creeks and trees, random cabins, farm animals semi-feral, men obsessively working the land -- hauling, pulling, cutting, chopping -- I was reminded of my grandfather, father, and even now, my brother. (A trip to see that part of the family isn't complete without something being hauled, a cabin or milk house explored.)

I will admit to laughing a few times Tekulve's characters remarked on the West Virginia landscape as resembling Sicily; my family was stationed in Sicily for a few years when I was a child, and the country was gripped in a terrible drought the entire time we were there. My memory of Sicily is of a dry, stony, yellowed place, scrub and withering trees rather than the sort of verdant hilliness I associate with West Virginia. It wasn't until a few years ago when traveling in the Mediterranean did I see Sicily as it usually is -- fresh, green, hilly but alive -- but I still can't shake the sense of it as I knew it. (This isn't a knock against Tekulve's description of place!)

The vignette-y style reminded me immediately of Jennifer Haigh's Baker Towers and Ursula Hegi's Floating in My Mother's Palm, so readers who enjoy those kind of family sagas will enjoy this volume (grandmother with Sicilian background not needed). Highly recommended for fans of immigrant stories and rural American life in the first half of the 20th century. ( )

The year is 1924 and sixteen year old Emma wakes one night in War, West Virginia with coal dust in the air. A train has overturned and spilled coal over the porch of her home. Caleb Sypher, a railroad man who is many years older than Emma, helps to dig her and her family out. A week later Emma marries Caleb who takes her far from her childhood home to the mountains of Virginia and 46 acres of pristine wilderness. Over the next several decades, Emma and Caleb’s family live their lives against the backdrop of stunning scenery. They have babies, and struggle against poverty and unimaginable losses. They despair over unfaithfulness and mourn when illness strikes. And they find the simple joy in the freedom of wild horses, the leaping of trout from a cold mountain river, and the breathtaking beauty of colorful wildflowers. Sometimes they leave, but they always return, anchored to the land which they call home.

In The Garden of Stone is a multi-generational novel about the power of family and what it means to be a part of the land on which one lives. Susan Tekulve has had many short stories published, and her first novel feels a bit like short stories woven together. The book is a very literary novel where the characters drive the narrative. Each chapter moves the story forward through the years, introducing successive generations of the Sypher family. When Caleb dies, Emma grieves so deeply that her son Dean briefly returns to the poverty stricken coal town of War, West Virigina where he is raised by his grandmother and aunt. Eventually he returns to the family homestead and begins his own family. The reader comes to understand Dean and his wife, Sadie, and gets to watch their daughter grow up to adulthood. There are also other minor characters including a disturbed tramp who lives off the land, a friendly (albeit alcoholic) veterinarian, and a neighbor whose wife leaves him after the suspicious death of their son.

An important aspect of In The Garden of Stone is that of the Italian immigrants who came to the United States to stake their roots, raise their families and find work in and around Virginia. Tekulve captures not only the challenges these immigrants faced, but the culture which they brought with them from Italy. Early in the book, Caleb brings home rocks to create an Italian inspired garden for him and Emma. He finds joy in creating this oasis as a reminder of what his family left behind.

Tekulve’s writing has a dreamlike quality and she writes with authority about the Virginia mountains and the depressed coal towns of West Virginia. Perhaps the strongest aspect of her novel are the descriptions of the landscape. There were times as I was reading where I could feel the warm breeze, smell the sweetness of wild roses, and hear the gurgle of water as it rushed around river rocks.

In The Garden of Stone is a quiet book. The plot is not exciting or fast paced, instead the novel celebrates the lives of its characters – their growth, their struggles, their dreams and disappointments. There were times I wished to stay longer with certain characters but Tekulve left them behind to pursue the stories of the next generation. I kept returning to the feeling I had from the beginning – that this was a series of linked stories, any one of which could have stood on their own, but were made stronger by being connected to each other.

Some readers may find the pace of this book too slow, but I enjoyed the leisurely journey through the lives of the characters. Those who like character-driven stories with a deeply rooted sense of place will find In The Garden of Stone a satisfying summer read. ( )