Garden for the Blind
Captivating linked stories that follow a group of characters from an upscale suburb of Detroit over several decades.
In Garden for the Blind, trouble lurks just outside the door for Kelly Fordon's diverse yet interdependent characters. As a young girl growing up in an affluent suburb bordering Detroit, Alice Townley witnesses a tragic accident at her parents' lavish party. In the years that follow, Alice is left mostly in the care of the household staff, free to forge friendships with other pampered and damaged teens. When she and her friend Mike decide to pin a crime on another student at their exclusive high school, the consequences will reverberate for years to come.
Set between 1974 and 2012, Fordon's intricately woven stories follow Alice and Mike through high school, college, and into middle age, but also skillfully incorporate stories of their friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers who are touched by the same themes of privilege, folly, neglect, and resilience. A WWII veteran sleepwalks out of his home at night, led by vivid flashbacks. A Buddhist monk is assaulted by a robber while seated in meditation. A teenaged girl is shot walking home from the corner store with a friend. A lifelong teacher of blind children is targeted by vandals at the school she founded.
Garden for the Blind visits suburban and working-class homes, hidden sanctuaries and dangerous neighborhoods, illustrating the connections between settings and relationships (whether close or distant) and the strange motivations that keep us moving forward. All readers of fiction will enjoy the nimble unfolding of Fordon's narrative in this collection.
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Garden for the Blind is a more idiosyncratic book than one might realize after a cursory read, a provocative and unconventional meditation on privilege, fate, and the city of Detroit. Kelly Fordon's debut in full-length fiction is a collection of closely interlinked short stories that follow a small cast of characters from childhood to middle age. One of the satisfactions of reading linked-story collections is the sensation, a bit like time travel, of being guided through someone's life by someone (think Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts) who knows all the most important moments to show you.
--Tyler Baldwin "The Common"In her new collection, Garden of the Blind, Fordon has mastered that difficult art of writing stories that stand alone but that also share characters, places, and incidents to form something that feels almost like an episodic novel. She has meticulously constructed the chronology of her characters' lives through forty years of development, from 1974 to 2014. That may be the reason that this collection feels so satisfying. When we read short stories we often feel as if we've looked through a small window at one tiny moment of the characters' lives. Here, we get to do that and then also get to see other moments through other windows.
--Keith Taylor "Ann Arbor Observer"In Kelly Fordon's new collection, Garden for the Blind, place predominates. That place is economically challenged Detroit and the affluent suburbs that surround the city. The race and class challenges afforded by having people of vastly different means living in close proximity are at the center of the book. . . . As in life, there are no perfect endings. Fordon tackles the messy, complex truth about race and class in her interesting stories.
--Ellen Birkett Morris "Best New Fiction"Grosse Pointer Kelly Fordon has authored a tremendous, beautifully written book. . . Garden for the Blind is amust-read for contemporary society, a kaleidoscope of the human condition.
--Carrie Cunningham "Grosse Pointe Magazine"Simply written, these stories reveal how easy it is to be misunderstood and how difficult it is to reconcile past mistakes.
--Kirkus Reviews "Kirkus Reviews"
