The Wedding Garden by Linda Goodnight

This is a Christian romance and part of a series called Redemption River. I must admit, I'm not Christian. So, its kind of odd that I would read this book, right? Well, to be quite honest, I didn't select this book myself. A snippet of this book, the prologue and first chapter, were sent to me in the mail, asking for my opinion on the book as a potential reader. So, I read the snippet and gave them my opinion, and as a reward they sent me this book and one other.

I have to say that I'm glad they did it. Just reading that first little bit of the book already had me wondering what was going to happen next. Not that I expected a lot of adventure, chaos and mayhem. I mean, it is a Christian romance. But, there was still that element of interest, nonetheless.

There was certainly an element of God and Jesus in the book, but to be honest it didn't seem to me like it permeated the entire thing. It didn't get in the way. Every other word wasn't about God or Christianity. So, that made it easier for me to read and probably lent to the interest of it. At least, for me.

There are many characters, and none of them are necessarily original. But, they still add to the book in a good way as per the way they were written. It flowed well, in other words.

Sloan Hawkins, the main character, the character the book was more or less about. He was dark and brooding, troubled. He had grown up in the town of Redemption. His father was a criminal who died in prison. His mother was a woman who was misunderstood and had a reputation as a slut and worked in a truck-stop diner. Her reputation was sullied because she would take drunk men to her home and let them sleep it off on her couch rather than drive around drunk. Nobody believed she wasn't actually sleeping with them, so naturally...rumors spread. Sloan is haunted by the fact that she just up and left one night, never to return. Nobody knew where she was, and apparently only Sloan ever thought it was weird that she left. Rumors were spread that she left in the middle of the night with a man she met at the diner, some trucker, and left Sloan all by himself.

Aunt Lydia, Sloan's ailing aunt who took care of him after his mother disappeared. She raised him from boyhood and though he had a troubled youth and eventually left town, he has always had a soft spot for his aunt. She is someone he respects and loves deeply. And she is the reason he came back to Redemption, after so long away, despite the fact that he hates the place and just about everyone in it.

Annie Markham, Sloan's high school sweetheart. She's harbored a lot of resentment and hate for Sloan since he left, but as we find out as the book steadily progresses, its understandable to a point. Annie is the police chief's daughter. She's kind, responsible and dependable. In the time that Sloan has been away, she's been married and divorced, she's had two children, and she is now Aunt Lydia's home-care nurse. She doesn't live there, but she spends quite a lot of time there caring for Lydia, seeing as the older woman lives alone. Although, now that Sloan is back the slack is taken off of Annie just a wee bit, but he's no nurse.

Chief Dooley Crawford, Annie's father, the police chief of Redemption. He has it out for Sloan. He threatened, blackmailed, and set Sloan up years ago so that he'd run off and leave Redemption, and leave his daughter alone. However, there was a much more secret and pressing reason that Chief Crawford made the decision to run Sloan out of town one way or another, and it had nothing to do with Annie.

Justin Markham, Annie's oldest child. He's a troubled boy, with a bad reputation around town as a troublemaker, who feels unwanted, unloved, a failure, and directionless. This is, in part, because his parents are divorced. He feels as if it might have been his fault, and he has a lot of anger and resentment over this, as well as anger and resentment at his father for leaving in the first place and leaving his mother and sister. The kids around town aren't too nice to him, either, and he gets into fights regularly. His grandfather, Chief Dooley, doesn't seem to pleased with the boy, for obvious reasons. And at 11, he's starting to get into that awkward stage anyway.

Ulysses "Popbottle" Jones is a character that I found quite endearing. Despite that, I might not have added him among the prominent characters, except for the fact that he plays a pretty significant role throughout the book, even though at first it might not seem so. He used to be a professor, but now he's among the downtrodden poor and hangs around with a dumpster diver named G.I. Jack. He's a very well spoken older gentleman, despite this, and has made many mistakes in his past. Among them was the love that he left behind in Redemption when he went to follow his own path, only to find out it wasn't what it had seemed nor what he really wanted.

These characters are all very endearing in their own way...well, except Chief Crawford, but I'm sure that was done on purpose. The book is well written and flows and progresses steadily and quite well. I definitely enjoyed it.

Gender roles are thick here, however, and impossible to miss. Men are stereotypically rugged, enigmatic creatures of habit or exasperation. Women are for the most part delicate, in need of protection and humoring from men, and so forth. These gender roles are there, and they are annoying, but they are not made a huge deal out of and it is muted in a way. And, considering that this is a Christian romance, it isn't all that surprising. I expected it, I was ready for that, so it didn't bother me as much as it might have if it had just sprung on me out of nowhere.

There really aren't too many places where this book lags for me. By the time you get to the last page of a chapter, each time there is something there that leaves you wondering. It really is a page turner.

Almost as soon as Sloan rides into town, he catches the Chief Dooley's attention. In fact, he catches everyone's attention. And he is aware of it. He has a severe disdain for the people of this town as a whole and he isn't interested in hiding it. Nor is anyone else apparently interested in waiting to spread rumors about why they think he might be back, why they think he left, and so on and so forth. Every town has its nosy old biddies, and Redemption is no exception.

Sloan's biggest irritation with the town seems to be the hypocrisy he perceives. Everyone is so big on Christianity, God, Jesus, church, family, love. But, at the same time as far as he can tell nobody really acts all that Christian. Spreading rumors, judging people, treating others like dirt...these are not Christian values. But, these are the things he remembers from the people of Redemption his entire life, things he remembers flung toward him, toward his mother even after she was gone and no longer there to defend herself, toward his father. He doesn't see much point in God, in Christianity. Why should he? What he's been shown of it is hypocrisy and rudeness, and mean-spiritedness.

Despite this Sloan is not an atheist. He is disenchanted with Christianity and God, he perhaps even harbors resentment toward the religion and its god, but that just shows he does believe in some sense. Then again, this is just my opinion of things. I don't feel that someone who is angry or feels resentment toward a deity could be considered an atheist, simply because if you are hating or resenting something you must believe that the entity exists.

At first, his return to Redemption doesn't do much to dispel these impressions of Christianity and God for him. And there isn't really a lot of emphasis put on it, either. Christianity and God are elements of this story, but they are not the centerpiece. And, I think this is because while most people who are Christian do center their life around their religion and their god, you don't hear God, Jesus, and Christian(ity) out of their mouths every other word. There are references to them, and to prayer, especially if something important (bad or good) is going on. But, for the most part people don't usually feel the need to talk about it all the time. And, I think that's what it was with this book. It was an aspect of the book, just like Christianity, God, and prayer are aspects of people lives, but it wasn't all there was to it. For me, that's one major thing that made this book readable.

Throughout the book, Annie and Sloan are the real main characters. The book really centers around them. Lydia was what brought Sloan back to town, and she's what keeps him there. And she's even the reason he finds God, but her role is actually pretty small as far as appearances go. I liked her and her death scene (there is no secret made from the beginning of this book that she is dying) was quite sad and I'll admit I shed a few tears.

Sloan's devotion to his aunt is actually very endearing. He's a skeptical person, a realist most of the time, a bit prideful, a typical bad boy, but with a heart of gold underneath. He's a good person who was dealt a bad hand and let it cloud his vision. But, his aunt appears to have been his brightest spot, one of his points of weakness. And the way he took her death was touching and endearing. His bedside inability to believe she was dying was more than touching. It wasn't the sort of throw-yourself-on-the-body-and-weep sort of moment you might expect out of dramatic moments in books or movies. No, instead he begged and bargained with her, if she lived he'd take her somewhere special. If she stayed with him, he'd do anything. This is actually one step of grieving.

I think all throughout the book until that point, Sloan knew she was dying but simply just refused to believe it. Everyone else, including Lydia, knew she was dying and had accepted it, though. In fact, that's why she was home instead of in a hospital. There was nothing that could be done for her aside from keeping her comfortable at this point, and her fondest wish was to be able to go home and die peacefully there. Which is exactly what she did.

Unfortunately, this happened RIGHT after (like the next day) Sloan found God. I must admit, I was actually wondering if he was going to decide he was angry at God again, but he didn't seem to do that. It wasn't until later in the book that this was addressed. He knew it would solve nothing, he'd already been down that road for other reasons before, and he knew that if his aunt Lydia could speak to him now she would not want him to forsake God again over her death. I like the maturity and the ability to self-examine himself and his feelings and situations that Sloan has throughout the book, even if some of it comes a bit later.

As for why this book is called The Wedding Garden. This book takes place in Redemption, as I mentioned, but a lot of it also takes place in or around the house of Sloan's aunt. This house had, for many...many years had a famous garden in the back that was so beautiful a lot of people wanted to have their weddings there. This garden is a very important aspect of the book. A lot of things center around this. One of Sloan's major goals in the book is to get that garden finished before his aunt died. And, even when that didn't happen, he kept on working the garden to restore its former glory. It had become run down because without Lydia, there was no one to tend the garden, anymore. She'd been too sick and weak to do it herself for quite some time.

This garden also supplied the venue for Sloan to get to know Annie's son, Justin. As I mentioned before, he is a troubled youth and Sloan knows something about troubled youths, as he used to be one. He saw that the boy was lacking structure, guidance and a male role model in his life and so he took it upon himself to try to help out. It was certainly a way to try to make peace with Annie, but he was also genuinely fond of the boy and genuinely wanted to help him work through whatever it was he needed to work through. To give him direction, something he had not had when he was a boy.

And, one of the first things this garden also does for Sloan, in a bit of a round-about way, is that it shows him that not everyone in the town of Redemption is against him or into spreading rumors. When he decided to start work on the garden, the first thing he did was stop by a plant farm/garden center to get supplies. He meets a woman there, Delores Miller, that he vaguely remembered from before he'd ever left. She treated him like a regular person, which was more than can be said for some other people he'd already encountered.

Speaking of that, it leads right up to something I want to talk about, because its one of my favorite aspects of Sloan Hawkins. He's got a caustic wit that he's not afraid to use, especially against nasty people who seek to hurt him. Take, for example, this excerpt from chapter 3, page 33:

"Say, you're Sloan Hawkins, aren't you? Clayton Hawkins's son?" she snapped her fingers as if trying to remember something. "And his wife -- what's her name? Worked over at the diner? Janie?"

Sloan skewered her with a dark glare. If she was trying to get a rise out of him by pretending ignorance, she was succeeding.

"Joni." he muttered through clenched teeth.

"That's right. Now I remember." Right. As if she'd actually forgotten. "She's the one that ran off with that trucker, wasn't she? Sure was a crazy thing to do, leaving you behind and all. Did you ever hear from her again?"

Never let 'em see you sweat.

With a cocky grin he didn't feel, Sloan leaned in and imitated her tone. "Say, aren't you the mom of that mean little creep, Ronnie? And isn't that your broom parked by the curb outside?"

Roberta jerked back, face flushing bright red. "Well, I never!"

Sloan showed his teeth in a feral smile. "Now you have."

I have to say that when I was reading that, especially those last two lines, I had to grin. I know people like Roberta and they always think they're so cute. I love it when someone has a great way to confidently give them a taste of their own medicine. Unfortunately, they generally don't learn their lessons.

And, just for context's sake, I would like to mention who Ronnie is. Sloan did not just poke a jab at that woman's son for no reason just to get at her. Ronnie is a little boy that goes to school with Justin and he had been making fun of Annie one day. It got Justin riled up, they got into a fight, and Justin got into trouble. Nobody knew exactly what had caused the fight, because Justin refused to tell. Even refused to tell his mother. However, he did tell Sloan upon a bit of coaxing. I suppose that despite this, the jab at the boy was not really necessary. It was a bit uncalled for. The boy kid is obviously learning bad manners and habits from his mother and repeating the nasty things she says. But, I think, in a way, Sloan was kind of killing two birds with one stone. He was getting back at Roberta for trying to hurt him and he was getting back at her for teaching her son it was okay to pick on other people. Too bad Roberta probably didn't take the hint and try to adjust her behavior.

Chief Dooley makes it his mission throughout the book to try to run Sloan out of town again. Except, this time, Sloan is no longer a kid without direction or confidence in himself. This time, Sloan will not be pushed or run out of anywhere until he is ready to be, regardless of how much he dislikes the town and most of its people. However, the twist in the book has everything to do with Chief Dooley, Joni Hawkins, and what REALLY happened the night she disappeared.

At this point I would really love to get into the nitty gritty of it all, but it makes the best twist of the book and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who might want to read it.

Long story short (yeah right, look at the length of this thing already!), Sloan inevitably finishes most of the garden and decides to stay once he and Annie put their differences aside and realize they still have feelings for each other. Especially after the truth comes out about Chief Dooley, and the night Sloan ran off.

You might think I've just spoiled the book, after all! But, oh...nay, I say. There are a few other plot twists I didn't mention, some of them predictable, and some of them not. And they're all pretty good and they all make the book. The characters in this book, especially Sloan, are memorable even if they aren't completely original. They have a sense of reality to them, they could easily be real people that you might meet one day. Even Sloan.

I like that about this book. While it is fiction and it is romance, its not dirty. Its not a bodice ripper, and it doesn't need to be. It stands alone and is a great book without the dirt. Its a great book without having to embellish the characters or their dialogue so much that they sound fake or strange or silly.

Its definitely a nice change from the usual romance books I read. I like this book and I definitely recommend it to anyone who has the time to sit down and read it. I don't think you'll be disappointed with it.