HANNAH’S GARDEN

A teenager and her mother are caught between opposing forces of nature magic in this atmospheric, if deliberately paced, fantasy. News that her grandfather, a renowned, reclusive painter of fantasy landscapes, is in the hospital draws Cassie and her mother Anne to his isolated farmhouse, which they find in a state of moldy ruin. What’s happened? Shuttling between the farm and the Intensive Care Unit, Cassie encounters one enigmatic sign or eldritch creature after another—most of which no one else, except perhaps her secretive, mercurial mother, seems to notice. A mysterious fiddler, a weirdly seductive biker, a frighteningly violent neighbor, and a strange, spiral garden planted by Cassie’s great-grandmother Hannah are all pieces of a puzzle that isn’t fully assembled until near the end. As it turns out, two powers are struggling for control of one of the few unspoiled places left to them, and Cassie’s Poppy has made a bargain with the more rational, less brutal one that is failing along with his life. With the help of Hannah’s journal, Cassie gradually pieces together her family’s central role in an ancient struggle, and emerges from the deadly climactic confrontation ready to take up the task of protecting the farm’s powerful but fragile residents. Like the tales Cassie remembers her mother telling, this is “filled with wonderment and botany,” as well as music, deep relationships between generations, and complex, evocative magic-working. (Fiction. 12-15)