The Garden Party

May 1, 2018

This garden party is a wedding rehearsal dinner at the home of Pindar and Celia Cohen, who live next to a woods and pond in Brookline, MA. Pindar is a scholar of ancient Babylonian texts. The Cohens, including daughters Sara and Naomi, are eccentric even by the standards of academia. Their son Adam is a poet engaged to Eliza, the daughter of the stuffy Barlows, proper Boston lawyers. With two dozen characters ranging in age from precocious children to very elderly grandparents, the scene is set for some interesting interactions between two quite different families. Romance is in the air, but in unexpected ways. The story takes place over the course of a day, culminating in a lovely summer evening that does not go according to plan, and it appears to be set in the 1990s, so the characters are not glued to today's electronic devices; a wise choice on the author's part. VERDICT This shimmering novel stands apart from those with similar themes owing to the mercurial feeling conjured by the author's elegant prose, as if the Cohens' garden has an enchantment all its own.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 28, 2018
In this witty novel from Mazur (Trespass), two very different families assemble in the garden of a house in Brookline, Mass., for a rehearsal dinner. The house belongs to the Cohens, an eccentric Jewish clan. Father Pindar, an expert on ancient cultures, is doing research for a book on Babylonian cooking. Daughter Sara is dating a Jesuit priest, Dennis Lombroso. Sara’s sister, fragile Naomi, has to be coaxed out of her bedroom to attend the dinner for her brother, Adam, a poet, engaged to Eliza Barlow, whose WASPy family members are mostly attorneys. Battle lines are drawn early as Celia, Pindar’s wife, a literary critic, frets over the seating chart, and Eliza’s father, Stephen, likens the house to a third world country because there is no Wall Street Journal on the front hall table. As the party gets underway, Pindar’s 91-year-old mother recalls the Paris of her youth, Eliza’s brother hits on Naomi, the Barlow grandchildren go native at a nearby pond, and Adam and Eliza decide that an elopement might be the best course of action. Although the Barlows are barely differentiated, readers will be charmed by this stylish ensemble novel, which expertly dissects family dynamics over the course of one fateful day.

May 15, 2018
The two very different families of an engaged couple meet for a prenuptial dinner in the garden of the groom's parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts."The excitable flower beds toss light and color to one another and toward the weathered shingles of the house, but the brilliance of the sun causes the rooms inside to appear cavernous and dark. Ecstatic chopping noises come from the kitchen, the staccato pulse of knife on wood, scallions mostly, mint." Former biologist Mazur's (Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination, 2010) novel wafts in on a heady cloud of flowers, fragrances, and jewellike descriptions, redolent with overtones of Virginia Woolf and A Midsummer Night's Dream and finishing notes of Julia Glass. Generously, the author begins by sharing the seating plan devised by the hostess, Celia Cohen, for her party of 25. It's a face-off between the Cohens, a family of academics, poets, and world travelers, including their cosmopolitan 91-year-old matriarch, and the Barlows, a sedate family of lawyers, with their mildly demented and unpredictable 89-year-old grandpa. Perhaps the author's sympathies lie a little too blatantly on the side of the Cohens, or maybe those Barlow people really are just that insensitive, stuffy, and adulterous. To get through so much happening to so many in just 240 pages, the novel is very light on its feet, whisking us through a slide show of mostly delightful scenes, both live-action and in the minds and memories of the characters. There is a naked badminton game, a hilarious rundown of the dietary prohibitions of each of the guests--"Yellow? You can't be allergic to yellow. Not to a color. That makes no sense"--a moving moment in Logan airport, and lots of interesting information about bugs, plants, and ancient Babylonian recipes. Some of the more complicated fictional gambits, involving interfamily relationships, are too rushed to be fully believable. As for the final vignette, which takes us off to another time and place, well, it wasn't the dessert we were hoping for, really.Beautifully written and bracingly intelligent.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2018
The day before Adam Cohen and Eliza Barlow are to wed, Adam's parents, Celia and Pindar, host a rehearsal dinner in the garden of their home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The purpose of the dinner is to knit the Cohen and Barlow clans together, but the two families have trouble finding common ground. The Cohens are put off and intimidated by the Barlow clan, which consists mostly of lawyers. The Barlows, for their part, think of the Cohens as head-in-the-clouds academics whose avocations (Adam's poetry, Pindar's book on ancient Babylonian cooking) have no practical use. As the day unfolds, the guests, who range in age from 3 to 91, arrive. Adam and Eliza make furtive attempts to tie the knot in advance to forestall wedding-day panic. Events take unexpected turns for several of the people around the dinner table, including Adam's sisters and grandmother. The descriptions of the garden are lush, and Mazur (Trespass, 2002) does a fine job of evoking a summer evening as well as juggling her many characters. Give this to readers who enjoy a comedy of manners and won't mind the leisurely pace.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)