VERDICT: 3 / 5 books
Anna: I really wanted to love this, and I hate to say this about a Nina Lacour book, but Meet Me in the Garden didn’t land for me.
Summary: Odette and her large Creole family live in New Orleans. One summer Odette’s best friend and cousin, Delphine, becomes pregnant by a white man and flees the South to have the baby. Shortly after, Odette, her sisters, and their husbands also leave for LA in an attempt to escape racism. There, they build a new life, but are haunted by family trauma and secrets, particularly when Delphine shows up in their lives again with a daughter she’s unable to care for. Meanwhile, Odette hides her identity as a gay woman from her family for years and years.
What I liked: The themes and ideas, which include mental health, female friendship, sisterhood, and motherhood, what we owe to each other as we grow and change, LGBTQ+ identity and being closeted, and race and being white passing.
LA felt very alive as a setting and like a character in itself, which I really liked.
However, this suffered from multiple “bookish pet peeves” of mine that unfortunately really get under my skin when I encounter them, including:
- When a character is naturally gifted at something, usually artistic, and faces little to no obstacles in their rise to success. The only challenges Odette faced was time and almost gassing out her kids with paint fumes that one time she was painting in a closed room. And very conveniently, she happened to be friends with an art collector who successfully sold all her paintings and made Odette a big star at their first ever art show.
- When things keep happening to characters because it’s convenient for the plot rather than because it’s believable or because of actual character development. I could almost hear Lacour say to herself, “Okay, this is what needs to happen next!” And then it did, but without the tension or pay off.
- Secrets that turn out to not be a big deal. Then why did we spend 600 pages worrying about them? The story also hinged around two big secrets- Odette’s sexuality and Nathalie’s mother, Delphine, being alive. These secrets both held a lot of tension through the entire book until they were revealed and just… didn’t really matter. After so much book and pages, I just didn’t believe everything could be resolved so rosily.
Maybe I’m just used to reading bleak books and am not used to such a neatly tied bow of an ending, but for these reasons, Meet Me in the Garden didn’t work for me. It also felt entirely too long even though the book description warned it was decades-spanning.
Overall, I enjoyed the messy but loving family dynamic of Odette’s family and think you still may really like this if you like family sagas and more upmarket historical fiction.
