The Gardener by S. A. Bodeen - Book Review #66

The Gardener

by S. A. Bodeen

Mason has never known his father, but longs to. All he has of him is a DVD of a man whose face is never seen, reading a children’s book. One day, on a whim, he plays the DVD for a group of comatose teens at the nursing home where his mother works.*And before he knows it, Mason is on the run with the girl, and wanted, dead or alive, by the mysterious mastermind of this gruesome plan, who is simply called the Gardener.

Will Mason be forced to destroy the thing he’s longed for most?

From goodreads.com*

How far will you go to help a person you know for less then fifteen minutes? Will you hesitate to sacrifice everything in order to do that? Mason – the main character of The Gardener – didn’t. He knew that was a right thing to do. It turned out into a lifetime adventure in length of twenty four hours that changed his life forever, revealing the secrets of his past he didn’t even know existed.

I expected to like this book, but I didn’t know that I will love it so much. The Gardener is The Minority Report meets YA sci-fi, fast paced, incredibly fun and sometimes completely terrifying YA sci-fi. I just couldn’t put the book down; I read it in one evening. Depending on how this book is pitched it can be a horror or sci-fi or even a mystery. Either way you can’t lose with this book.

I don’t want to sound like this book is a future classic, because I don’t think it is. The Gardener just a solid, entertaining, very nicely written and thought through book that can be enjoyed by any sci-fi admirer regardless if the reader is a teenager or not.

*I removed one sentence from the synopsis that in my opinion gives away the whole story. So if you are not afraid of spoilers that here is this sentence, but I don’t recommend to read it to anyone who hasn’t read the book and planning on doing so. SPOILERS!!! One of them, a beautiful girl, responds. Mason learns she is part of a horrible experiment intended to render teenagers into autotrophs—genetically engineered, self-sustaining life-forms who don’t need food or water to survive.