NYC Journalist and writer Mike Robbins names The Garden of Unfortunate Souls one of his "Best Reads of 2015"

As a debut novelist, it's not every day you receive recognition for your work. So when I learned this week that NYC journalist, writer, and professional book blogger Mike Robbins named Garden as one of his "Best Reads of 2015" I was honored. The following is his review of the book posted on his blog.

Fiction from 2015

Excerpt from The Mike Robbins Blog, January 18, 2016 

http://mikerobbinsnyc.blogspot.ca/2016/01/fiction-from-2015

...Eddie Mark’s The Garden of Unfortunate Souls opens on a wet and very stormy night in Buffalo, NY. The Mayor, Cornelius Brooks, has a problem. His high-living wastrel of a son, Audwin, has just lost control of a car while in a drunken stupor. He has careered through someone’s garden and into their porch, in a run-down, crime-ridden part of the city. Cornelius goes straight there in the small hours to give the house’s occupant, Loretta Ford, 500 bucks to shut up about it. She does. It gets out anyway, from a source closer to home. But Cornelius is just about to find out that his daughter’s in trouble too. Meanwhile, Loretta has her own story. Over the next ten or fifteen years, the lives of Cornelius and his family, and Loretta and her young son, unfold as they deal with the world as best they can.
 

Almost all of them are dysfunctional or troubled in some way. This is a story that’s full of crime and sexual and domestic violence. But there’s nothing voyeuristic about it; bad things are there but serve their purpose in the narrative. Neither is Mark trying to do a Bonfire of the Vanities using Buffalo instead of NYC. What interests him is how these people got that way. It’s not the effect of drugs, poverty or crime that he majors on, though there’s plenty of that. Neither is it about race; although the main characters are mostly black, that’s not the point. In this book, people’s troubles began at home, where they were in some way robbed of the vital spark that makes a person more than the sum of their parts, and helps them to transcend their surroundings. In fact the other book this made me think of was notBonfire so much as The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
 

Given some of the subject matter, this book could have been a depressing read, but I didn’t find it so. Mark brings his characters alive, and you find yourself caring about them pretty much from page one. There’s also a certain sly humour in the way some of them are portrayed – a lecherous church elder, for example; Mark could have simply made him a monster, but he’s too good a writer for that. Also, the book is written in an unshowy but quite elegant style that makes it easy and pleasant to read. 
 

This is Eddie Mark’s first book, apparently. His author bio on Amazon says he’s currently doing a doctorate, and I know from experience that those tend to be all-consuming – nothing much else happens until they’re done. I hope he does find time to write more books; I’ll be very pleased to read them.