The Night Garden

Horvath's latest novel--set on Vancouver Island in WWII--is a madcap comedy featuring a host of eccentric characters, a UFO, a ghost, a magic garden, and a missing top-secret military airplane. As usual, Horvath embraces the chaos, coming out the other side with everything making sense, somehow. Nascent writer Franny lives with her adoptive parents Sina and Old Tom on a small, remote farm. Their peaceful life is turned upside-down when they take in neighbor Crying Alice's three children for an unspecified length of time while she tries to prevent the children's father, the military plane's mechanic, from doing "something stupid." As the mystery of the children's father's involvement with the missing plane unfolds, the pace speeds up and new characters are introduced and swept into the plot's whirlwind. What keeps things grounded are Franny's cogent observations about people ("It was one thing having houseguests, and it was another having ones with their family dynamics thrown in"); the writing process ("That's the problem with telling people you write. They always want to give you things to write about. As if the things you write about could come from them. Or from you"); and Life ("What we think we want is not always what we choose. But what we choose becomes our lives"). Horvath's bright prose and unerring sense of timing keep us turning pages to arrive at the book's final, transcendently profound, scene. martha v. parravano