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Eddie Mark is a writer, researcher, educator, and former city chess champion of Buffalo, New York. His prize winning short stories have appeared in the Hart House Review and the anthology "Bloodlines: Tales from the African Diaspora." He is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Administration at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He divides his time between Buffalo and Toronto.
Reviewed by Carine Engelbrecht for Readers' Favorite
The Garden of Unfortunate Souls by Eddie Mark opens with the mayor's tearaway son Audwin crashing into the home of Bible-bashing single mother Loretta Ford and her unfortunate son Shadrack at three in the morning. While the boy's dad wants to keep the potential scandal under wraps at all costs, Loretta has skeletons of her own to hide, one of them being the niggling little detail that the house she resides in is technically not really hers. From this seemingly random occurrence, fate weaves a pattern that disrupts more and more lives from the extended circle of both key participants. While the consequences of lust and a life of crime are clearly illustrated, the apparent virtues of Mayor Cornelius Brooks' ambition and Loretta's fanatical brand of discipline are not without their price either.
The characterization of the novel is top notch and lends a choir of voices to the rise and fall of a mostly African American community. In The Garden of Unfortunate Souls, Eddie Mark uses each character to add a new layer of meaning to the drama and no one escapes unscathed from the shadow of their respective histories or the unseen scars they carry. Often present mistakes and motivations are the result of past indignities and injustices. As a reader, you are drawn deeper and deeper into the lives that populate the story, feeling the pain of each wrong turn and each missed opportunity. Life in the decaying Fruit Belt neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, is vividly captured in richly descriptive detail. Well done!
