Synopsis
The Victory Garden is about a young woman, Emily Bryce, who hates her boring life and wants to escape. However, her twenty-first birthday is coming up. So, until then, she is spoiled, entitled, naive, and entirely too dumb for her own good. She meets an Australian soldier at a convalescent home, and she instantly falls in love with him. When her mother finds out, she forces the home to move him to another hospital, and Emily follows him. She believes that she can become a nurse, like her friend Clarissa, simply because she wants to.
After Emily finds out that she cannot become a nurse because of her lack of skills, she heads to a recruitment office. Here, Emily signs up for the Women’s Land Army and starts her training near where the Australian is staying. She ends up pregnant after their one second of “love-making” and then he proposes. [Don’t even get me started on the “sex scene.” It begins and ends in one paragraph, with no descriptions. But Emily still thinks about the way Robbie “held her in his arms” the entire book.] She finally learns hard work for the first time in her life, but, don’t worry, she’s a natural at everything she tries. Soon, the army sends her to work in a wealthy woman’s garden, and then she finds out she’s pregnant. But don’t worry, I’m not spoiling anything. All of this is in the description of the book on Amazon…
My Reaction
This book is a series of convenient coincidences, predictable plot points, and over-exaggerated, cliched characters. And the title is entirely misleading. Yes, Emily ends up working as a gardeners-of-sorts, but what she is creating is hardly a victory garden. Emily is hardly victorious in life through her work as a gardener, so that angle doesn’t really work either.
So what exactly is this story supposed to be about?
Perhaps Emily will find new love while trying to make the most of her messy situation? The story hints at a few new relationships, so this is a possibility. A local man she has been spending time with proposes to her so she won’t be an outcast from society. Towards the end of the book, a new man comes into her life when he returns home from the war. However, we never see the realization of either relationship. So that really isn’t what the story is ultimately about.
Or perhaps this is a story about gardening. Or it could be about living within a wartime community and women rallying together for a united cause? Nope, not that either. Emily makes fast friends with women in the village, but there is a distinct lack of garden descriptions, or actual gardening, especially given the title of the book. I think I was expecting more of the Land Girls television series from this book. Or perhaps even Land Girls meets Home Fires meets Island at War. (I know all of these were about WWII, not WWI, but I wish the story was remotely like any of these.) However, instead, it’s a collection of convenient, predictable dialogue, where any conflict for Emily is quickly resolved.
What about that baby? Emily needs to figure out what to do with her life now that she is pregnant, unmarried, without a home or a concrete plan. Perhaps Emily will thrive after having the baby and create a new life for them. But, the baby isn’t born until the last couple of chapters (and it just pops out, easy as that!). So it couldn’t be that either.
And lastly, could the point of this story be that Emily needs to find her purpose in life away from her parents? This one works, a little bit, I suppose. She seems to like gardening and creating these “potions” or “recipes” to cure people in the village, but that entire plot point is just ridiculous. She finds a “recipe” book of different remedies using the herbs in her front garden, but none of them have quantities or directions, so she just guesses at both and all of her trials work perfectly. Oh, and did I mention she can magically cure the Spanish flu with one of her concoctions? Yeah, sure. Oh and then she also creates hand cream/salve using herbs and beeswax because, what, she has some sort of intuition about what will work correctly? As I said, this story is full of little coincidences that work out perfectly for Emily.
So many of the characters are pure cliched, caricatures of themselves, especially her mother and father.
At the beginning of the story, Emily describes her mother as being the most snobbish and downright mean-for-no-reason person who ever existed. However, as the reader, it was clear that she was incredibly broken and defeated by her own grief and that she was lashing out at anyone in her path.
And how in the world did her mother think that Emily would have ever been presented at court? The family is not land-owning titled gentry; her father is a judge, which basically means nothing to people in the King’s court. I find it highly unlikely that her mother thinks so well of herself that she imagines she’d be able to present her daughter at court without some amazing connections. Emily even says once that her family doesn’t exactly run in the same circles as the aristocracy…Just because the characters believed that they deserved it, doesn’t mean that they would magically be able to make it happen. Perhaps Bowen was using this to show how highly Emily’s mother thinks of herself despite being middle-class. However, it was just strange and out-of-touch with reality.
On the other hand, we rarely see her father. When we do see him, he’s yelling for no reason, telling Emily she is terrible for not wanting to live in a bubble or gossiping about people they know. Then, at the end of the story, he completely changes his personality. He wants Emily to move back in with them despite telling her that she was no longer welcome at home. He easily accepts the baby she has had outside of marriage with a man they did not approve of. And he claims that he never really meant any of the terrible things he said to her in the past. Wow. That is quite the leap, even for this author.
In the end, this book lacked any real descriptions. All the author did throughout the entire story was to tell us what happened, how Emily felt, who she met, and what they said. If asked to describe what the characters look like, or her cottage, or the town they lived in, I would come up short. This author doesn’t seem to know how to write descriptions full of imagery. Instead, the story sets a whole slew of characters and situations, but none of them are really necessary or resolved.
Rating
Now it’s your turn. Have you read The Victory Garden? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? If you want to chat about it please make sure to comment below or tag me on Instagram (@bookishkitchen #thebookishkitchen)! I love to hear from our followers.