GARDEN OF GOODBYES by FAITH ANDREWS :: REVIEW

‘When you survive the death of your heart, any other pain feels as insignificant as a pin prick.’

We love nothing more than to experience an author stepping out of their comfort zone, producing work you wouldn’t expect from them and in Garden of Goodbyes we witnessed quite departure from the Faith Andrews books we’ve previously read. This book was the gloom to the sweet, the raw to the passionate of her previous reads and we absolutely applaud her for telling the story that was in her heart. For telling it her way and for not romanticising addiction, but instead showing it in all its ugliness and destruction. She could have so easily taken this story down a certain path, yet she refrained and for that she has our admiration.

Those looking for a light read best be putting this one aside until you’re in the mood because Garden of Goodbyes is gloomy and depressing, yet it’s so honest, raw and at times emotionally brutal.

“Let this kind of love be enough because it’s all you can handle right now.”

There were moments during Garden of Goodbyes when our hearts were ripped open and raw, experiencing the emotions of these characters, yet there were times we struggled to connect to the ‘love and soulmate’ aspect of the story as emotional blow after emotional blow was delivered in this story of love versus hate, betrayal versus loyalty.

“I’d do anything for you, Edie. I’ve always loved you and I’ll never stop. Everything I do is for you. This, too. I’ll do it for you.”

This story starts out in the present where three lives are decimated through a series events we’re not initially privy to but are revealed through the POV’s of sisters Violet and Eden in past and present switches. Personally we would have loved a little more past explored and maybe a pov or two from Lennox to really feel the connection between Lennox and Eden before it all went so wrong. Had we been shown rather than told of their feelings, we would have experienced their connection on a more intense level.

‘I heard someone say once that you’re only as sick as your secrets. If that was the case, I was basically on my death bed.’

In saying that we were desperate to know how a love, so full of future dreams and aspirations between a star Rookie Quarterback, Lennox Dean and Eden Haywood, the ‘small town nobody who lucked out by occupying the heart of Lennox Dean for the last two years’ went so wrong?  And it was the cruellest of most humiliating of actions that would bring three people to the brink.

‘It was her name he whispered when he was so drunk he couldn’t stand. It was her face he saw in his drug-induced dreams. I knew this because it was her name that slipped from his lips when he cried out in agony for someone to save him. It was never me.’

Faith Andrews story carried a shadowy feel of foreboding throughout, there wasn’t a lot of light in this story and by the end we had a heaviness in our hearts and found our feelings moving all over the show, experiencing sympathy for characters one minute, hatred the next and swinging our emotions and feelings time and again.

“We’re written in the stars, Edie, destined to be together forever.”

Faith Andrews dug very deep to tell Eden, Violet and Lennox’s tragic story of addiction, family dynamics, love and betrayal. Knowing from the very beginning where this story was heading, resulted in us reading with a heaviness forever present in our hearts.