The Changeling Garden
The Story of a Garden with a Mind of Its Own
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
In The Changeling Garden by Winifred Elze, when Annie and Mark and their five-year-old son, David, move into a grand old Victorian house surrounded by a jumble of gardens, they are not prepared for the terrifying adventure that awaits them. Little David demonstrates an immediate affinity with the plants, who protect as well as play with him. Annie soon discovers a mysterious birthright and extraordinary powers of her own. And the entire family becomes involved in a fantastic ancient feud that is rooted in the garden, but quickly takes on global implications. The Changeling Garden is an amazement. Domestic events become frightening as familiar plants conspire to heal or kill, or even to infiltrate the minds of an entire community ... while a jungle thousands of miles away prepares to reclaim its rights to the very planet on which it lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nature run amok provides the chills in this first novel, whose rather campy story of ecological horror is a quick, engrossing read until it derails close to the end. Hours after the Carter family moves into their new home, a Victorian surrounded by gardens, five-year-old David develops an unnatural rapport with the plants in the backyard, and housewife Annie finds her soul transmigrating into the local wildlife. Armed with this new respect for the natural world, Annie then prevents her husband's sale of part of their acreage to developers intent on building a parking lot. Annie's quest to understand her family's strange affinity for their gardens leads her through a convoluted plot encompassing reincarnation, herbalism, Mayan mysticism and anthropological speculation in the manner of Erich von Daniken. Elze juggles these esoteric elements with enthusiasm, but the novel spins out of control when she reveals that the presumed perpetrator of several ritual murders around the neighborhood is the pawn of an ancient Toltec spirit who so detests humanity that he has engineered the gradual deforestation of the planet. A imaginative horror scenario thus deteriorates into an awkward, even laughable, slasher tale; in the manner of her villainous Toltec, Elze winds up cutting the heart out of her own novel.
