The son of hippie parents who dreams of an old-fashioned romance with roots, art professor Tyler falls madly in love with Claire a caterer with a cautious heart, who pours her passion into myriad secret recipes for lavender bread, dandelion quiche and geranium wine. Indeed, a temperamental apple tree with prophetic powers is one of Allen's delicately drawn and pluckily poignant characters, as is the new next-door neighbor. Abandoned as children by a mother whose favorite pastimes included shoplifting and bad men, the girls have inherited the family home and, above all, a mystical garden that is both feared and revered by the Waverlys' neighbors in Bascom, North Carolina. For sisters Claire and Sydney Waverly, an unplanned reunion born of desperation, not fondness, means tiptoeing around the shards of a painful shared history in their grandmother's stately Queen Anne home.
To be sure, Allen's literary debut is a magical novel, nearly perfect in capturing the imperfections that define a shattered family. For readers hopelessly smitten by Southern writers, North Carolina native Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells should arrive with a gentle warning: Proceed with caution once you start reading, this book is impossible to put down.
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