Book: The Divine Gardener's Handbook by Eli Snow
Reviewed by Rallie X
Rating: 3.5/5
This was certainly an interesting read. I loved the first ~2/3 of it, and then the final third got messy and kind of floundered along until the end.
The setting was so inventive and fun, it reminded me a lot of the first season of Miracle Workers - the people working in the Divine Garden are just people with jobs in a relatable capitalist theocratic city-state ("God was a part of life, like gender and the twelve-hour workday, that she had never questioned"; "Gods couldn’t be real, not in a world where people worked all their daylight hours for the privilege of just living to work another day."). Eli Snow created a heaven, purgatory, and hell as totally believable social classes where heaven is blissfully unaware of how well they've got it in their beautiful garden of plenty while people struggle to get by in the city or scrape away an existence in the undercity (the undercity is even referred to as the twelve hells).
Cyprin and Purcell were ridiculous (affectionate). These goofy-ass lesbians circling each other like cats, Purcell's self-absorbed and conceited attitude a perfect counter to Cyprin's absolute chaos drive (very Jason Mantzoukas' "destroy, dismantle, engulf in flames"). Their meet-cute? A nightmare. This is the kind of forced proximity where they're going to make it everybody else's problem as well and while I'd hate them in real life, on page I love them. I also appreciated that Snow gave Cyprin and Purcell solid reasons to be the way that they are - a chaotic character is fun but only if there's a reason for it, otherwise it just becomes mindless flailing; and an uptight, hyper-obsessive character gets boring real fast when we don't get to see the tiny cracks threatening to shatter (or explode). Snow did not make them likable, but they definitely made them fun!
My favorite character in the book was God/Saul. He was just so genuinely charming (his introduction to both main characters was hilarious and his PoVs brought so much life to the book), and I cried so hard when he died, I thought he might manage to escape and become just a regular guy out in the city but no, his escape came in the form of choosing his own death and taking somebody out with him.
I think this story might have been better served as a duology, because it felt like the first 2/3 was one book and the final third was a rush to a conclusion that introduced too much for the amount of space and conclusion-ing it needed to fulfill. There was just too much new stuff going on that when a major event occurred, I had to flip back to make sure I hadn't missed something (I hadn't, it was just too major a shift to come into play with nowhere nearly enough setup). It made the ending kind of unsatisfying and felt more like an exposition than a story's proper conclusion.
So generally speaking yes, this is a cool book. Is it one I'll reread? No. But I loved the premise and the characters and the overall plot, which is enough for a good time!