Book Review: The Moonlit Garden by Corina Bomann

The Moonlit Garden

By Corina Bomann (translated by Alison Layland) 
Published by AmazonCrossing and Sold by Amazon Digital Services, February 2016
Free as part of Amazon’s Kindle First program for Prime members 
Link: Amazon 
Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed this book quite a bit.  In fact, it might be my favorite Kindle First selection (certainly my favorite in some time).  It’s the kind of book I tend to enjoy anyway, as it moves back and forth between a present day story and a historical story related to a mystery the present-day characters are trying to solve.  The story begins when Lily Kaiser, a young, widowed antique dealer in present-day Berlin, receives a violin from a mysterious man who tells her it belongs to her.  In the lining, she finds a piece of sheet music, which takes her on a quest to England and then to Sumatra in search of the music’s origins and the reasons why she was given the violin.

The historical plots concern the violin’s two most famous owners, Rose and Helen, both of whom are child prodigies born on Sumatra who go to England for training and later become famous violinists.  Both women’s careers end in tragedy (that’s not a spoiler; we find out very early on), so the story isn’t terribly happy, but it’s certainly engaging.  The Moonlit Garden was a page-turner, in fact, as I followed Lily’s quest to discover what happened to Rose and Helen.

There were, however, a few things that didn’t quite work.  The first concerns the piece of sheet music.  That mystery drives the rest of the plot, but its resolution was unsatisfying.  I also found some other aspects of the book’s ending to be either unbelievable or so predictable that I rolled my eyes.  The writing is, in general, fine.  Bomann keeps up the tension pretty well, and since this is a translation (from German), it’s hard to judge the prose.  However, I was always aware that it’s a translation, insofar as characters’ language choices often didn’t seem natural and a lot of the wording just doesn’t quite “fit.”

What made me enjoy the novel in spite of its weaknesses was the way I came to care for the characters.  I wanted Lily to find out why she got the violin and I wanted to know what exactly happened to Rose and Helen.  I even got mildly interested in the present-day romance plot, once Bomann gave up pushing the “Lily is widowed and needs to learn to love again” plot point.  The relationship happened pretty organically once it got started, and they didn’t rush into a happily ever after ending that may or may not be feasible.  I appreciated that the characters were adults with lives that included romance but didn’t exclude everything else.

  

On the whole The Moonlit Garden isn’t great literature, but it’s fun.