THE GARDEN OF EVE

It’s been ten months since her mother died, and Evie feels the loss every single day. Having moved into an old house rumored to be cursed doesn’t help matters any, but at least Evie is distracted from her father’s withdrawal by the strange residents of their new town. There’s Alex, a boy that lingers in the cemetery claiming to be a ghost, and Maggie, a shopkeeper who presents Evie with the gift of a single seed. Evie becomes convinced that the seed hails from the original Garden of Eden, and decides to use it to find her mother. Instead, she learns almost too late that unnatural life can be a far more terrible and destructive thing than natural grief. The book is most effective when it seeks to understand and clarify Evie’s pain. Unfortunately, it loses ground when, instead of concentrating on a single fantastical element, Going creates an uncomfortable mélange of ghosts, magic and the Book of Genesis. The emotions may be sound, but the story demands a tighter focus on the otherworldly. (Fantasy. 9-13)