THE GARDEN ANGEL

Charming first novel tells a familiar story—a “horribly sticky” love triangle between a professor, his student, and the wife who helped him in his college years—but transforms a potentially trite subject into a comic delight.

Cutter, 25, works two jobs, as a waitress at the Pancake Palace and as a reporter on what she calls the “dead beat,” writing obituaries for the Sans Souci Citizen. Her great-grandfather established the mill in Palmetto, but three generations later, the family fortunes have gone downhill. Cutter is mindful of the family curse: “the minute they ventured out in the world seeking love, seeking more, the women in my family found nothing but trouble.” Her beloved Gran, recently dead, had raised Cutter and her older sister and brother. Their father was lost in foreign waters in Vietnam at age 23. Three years later, their mother, “running out for a pound of sugar, a box of Ivory Snow and a pound of snap beans,” collided with a three-wheeler. Now the other siblings want to sell the family estate, and Cutter is struggling to save the house and its “dead garden,” where Gran is buried near the garden angel. Sister Ginnie is pregnant by her professor Daniel and needs money to cover her health care (or possibly an abortion). Brother Barry, who is in the Marines, wants to buy a new car. Daniel’s wife Elizabeth has her own struggles against agoraphobia and the toil of writing a dissertation on garden imagery in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Through a series of odd circumstances, Cutter and Elizabeth end up in cahoots. Their unexpected friendship holds up even after Elizabeth discovers Ginnie is pregnant. Meanwhile, Cutter finds herself smitten with Curt, her boss at the newspaper. He seduces her in a disarmingly inept love scene, but his mother, who owns the paper, will not be denied her society daughter-in-law. Cutter, Ginnie, and Elizabeth all endure enough romantic troubles to keep the plot spinning along.

Winning characters and piquant wit, with an underpinning of graciousness: a standout.