Eden Hardcover – July 10, 2018

This is a great read. Hope is a mesmerizing character. You feel all of her emotions: pain, longing, fear, her profound sense of failure. Hope and her older sister Eden were kidnapped when they were teenagers. Their father forgot to pick them up. Their kid paper Larry is up for parole and Hope has received a !after from the DA asking if she and Eden want to write a !after to the parole board,but Hope has lost Eden. The book is about her search for Eden and Her narrative of the kidnapping. I couldn't put "Eden" down. Loved events imperfections. Hope (a word y you cannot get away from in the context of this book) you enjoy this novel as much as I did.

I enjoyed it. A not-so-young woman anymore searching for her absentee sister to finally deal with a heinous crime they both experienced many years before. In the end, the author tells us, you must heal yourself and not rely on others. It’s well put together and each character fleshed out with a story that moves quickly. Looking forward to other work by the writer.

This was so unsatisfying. Short, one sided, lacking conflict. Tons of potential, and then....not. I felt like the author just decided she’d written enough and laid down her pen. Why not have alternating perspectives? Meet up with the perp? Something to add some more texture. Way overrated.

Reading

As teenagers, Hope and her sister, Eden, accepted a ride from a stranger named Larry who claimed to have been sent by their father to pick them up. This novel picks up decades later, when Hope--a struggling playwright--attempts to track down Eden, whom she has lost contact with, for reasons relating to the aftermath of that fateful night."Eden" is a slow-paced, sometimes tense novel that shifts back and forth between Hope's adult life and her encounter with Larry, slowly revealing the trauma from her past. This back-and-forth shifting of time perspectives is what makes this novel work so well; told linearly, the story would be much less interesting and suspenseful. But at the heart of the novel are the themes of guilt and survival: What does it mean to survive a horrific trauma? Can Hope's father ever forgive himself for the mistake that led him not be there to pick the girls up himself? One of the most searing passages in the entire book, for me, was the section on pp. 177-179 where Hope envisions her father looking at the calendar and realizing that he had mixed the weekends up: "He will squint at the dates...Then he will start to get nervous. His stomach will feel dry. He won't know what to do. His legs will be frozen....And my dad will finally snap out of it and grab the phone and desperately dial my mom's number..." Any parent who has ever had the heart-sinking experience of not being able to locate their young child (and this includes pretty much every parent who ever lived) can empathize with Hope's father's anguish in this moment.This novel also explores the truth that even when traumatic events have a "happy" ending (Hope and Eden, after all, survive their abduction), the psychological effects can be long-lasting. Hope is barely functioning as an independent adult when the novel opens, unemployed and having just been kicked out of the illegal sublet she was staying in after the dissolution of her one long-term relationship. As she muses toward the end of the novel, "Somewhere in my head I thought surviving Larry gave me a certain kind of strength, an invincibility. No one could destroy me. Although, at the moment, I appeared to be doing a good job of destroying myself." Her search for Eden provides the vehicle for processing what had happened to both of them and offers the possibility of both closure and moving on.This is in many ways a dark and disturbing novel. But Kleine is a gifted novelist, and her characters--even the minor ones playing bit roles--sparkle with complexity and individuality. I look forward to reading more of her work.

Andrea Kleine's latest novel, "Eden", could really be titled, "Finding Eden". This wonderfully rendered novel is about two sisters, narrated by struggling playwright, Hope, in search of her sister, Eden, who has virtually disappeared.When Hope was 14 and Eden was 16, they were kidnapped from a bus station while waiting for their father to fetch them. The novel skillfully reveals details of the kidnapping in a perfectly-paced narrative, while also following Hope's search for her sister, made urgent by the fact that their abductor is soon to come up for parole.Through Hope's professional struggles, Kleine also explores using one's "real life" to make art. Hope's fellow-artist friend, Zara, urges her to use her kidnapping in her art: "We're self-commoditizing savages." she says. "The tragedy of life is raw material." I was moved to ponder this and wonder if using one's intimate and/or traumatic life experiences is cathartic or commercial...or both. Indeed, one of my favorite authors, Pat Conroy, credited his highly dysfunctional family for his successful novels. (He famously said that he couldn't write his masterpiece, "The Prince of Tides", until after his mother's death.)I read "Eden" in one too-hot-to-go-out, Saturday; there are 26 chapters in "Eden" and I think of it as a feast. Kleine graciously and elegantly sets the table for this 26-course meal and each course is a perfect ingredient building to a sumptuous and satisfying experience.