Garden of Stones - Sophie Littlefield

I’ve read two other Sophie Littlefield novels (A Bad Day for Pretty and The Missing Place), so I thought I knew what to expect from the author. As it turns out, I was only partially right about that, and that’s both good and bad news. The good news is that the plot of Garden of Stones is every bit as intriguing as I suspected it would be; the bad news is that the novel suffers from exactly the same flaw that bothered me in The Missing Place – more on that later. 

Garden of Stones is a historical fiction study of what it may have been like for a beautiful Japanese widow and her fourteen-year-old daughter to be on their own inside a West Coast internment/concentration camp during World War II. The internees/prisoners are entirely at the mercy of the staff in charge of their day-to-day existence and all of their activities at the Manzanar camp, and it is only a matter of time before bad things begin to happen to the extraordinarily beautiful Miyako Takeda – and then to her daughter Lucy. Miyako is being sexually exploited, as are numerous others in the camp, and she will do anything, absolutely anything, to keep the same from happening to Lucy. 

The story begins during the summer of 1978 and is told largely through the eyes of Patty Takeda, Lucy’s about-to-be-married daughter. Patty never knew Miyako, her grandmother, and Lucy has told her very little about her own experiences inside Manzanar. But now, almost forty years later, after the police suddenly accuse Lucy of murdering one of her neighbors, all that is about to change. If Patty is going to be able to defend her mother from the murder charges, she is going to have to know exactly what happened to Miyako and Lucy in 1942. But when Patty discovers old photo albums among the dead man’s possessions, she realizes just how seriously in trouble her mother really is. 

Early on, the story begins flashing back and forth between 1942 and 1978, and for most of the book, the reader knows more about what really happened in Manzanar than Patty knows. We know the truth, for instance, about Lucy’s horribly disfigured face – which is how she was placed near the murder scene by witnesses – long before it is revealed to Patty, who has never known her mother not to be disfigured. We know that Lucy has good reason to be bitter about her past, and that the murdered neighbor was more than he seems. Part of the novel’s intrigue is watching Patty try to catch up with the rest of us as her mother’s sad story is steadily revealed. 

Sophie Littlefield

And then, about eighty or ninety percent of the way through the story, just as happened in Littlefield’s The Missing Place, everything is rushed to its conclusion with one revelation after the other – so many of them, so quickly, that it is almost overwhelming. The story is told in such an out-of-balance way, that it ends up feeling top-heavy and contrived. There are so many “big reveals” that I began to lose track of them, and was left feeling a bit frustrated by such a drastic and sudden change of pace. 

Bottom Line: Garden of Stones tells a good story, but Littlefield’s rushed ending lessens its impact by reminding the reader that they may not have been provided with all the clues necessary to answer some very important questions on their own. Whether that’s a fair approach or not may be open to question, but I find it frustrating enough to make me wary about investing time in another Sophie Littlefield novel now that it’s happened in two of the three novels of hers I’ve read.

Audiobook fans will be pleased to note that veteran narrator Emily Woo Zeller does a very good job with Garden of Stones. Her voice is pleasant, and it lends itself well to distinguishing the various characters from one another. Too, her reading-pace nicely keeps the action moving.