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sipping_tea_with_ghosts's review
3.0
Didn't expect much when I picked up this small paperback from a dusty shelf in a closing bookstore, but William Sleator did a nice job with the concept and the story isn't too long or full of exposition dumps to drag down the pace. If you like parallel universe sci-fi with some wacky scenarios and tolerable teenage protagonists, then feel free to pick this book up for a quick weekend read.
williamsdebbied's review
2.0
Susan feels resentful because her parents expect her to hang out with and take care of her older brother, Gary. Gary, who used to be athletic, is now confined to a wheelchair and gets weaker every day. When their garden begins to act strangely, they discover the entrance to a maze at the center of the garden that lets them to travel to alternate realities. The author lost me with the details of quantum physics, but readers who enjoy science might feel differently. Good descriptions and suspense help keep the pages turning.
kilgoretrout's review
4.0
Gary is sick and his sister Susan must take him out to the garden behind their house each day, a chore that she hates but does it because it makes him feel better. Over time they discover that the garden is "quantum" and has rehabilitating effects on Gary. Eventually they discover the path reorienting itself and during an outing they discover a maze that they've never been able to get to but can see from their upstairs bathroom window. Once inside the maze they notice a "probability cloud" of themselves and Gary postulates that the garden is undergoing changes where it's offering up different universes like Shrodingers cat is both alive and dead. Like, the gardener, had a cat named Sro-dee who they think might be the link in finding the right universe where Gary is healthy. Unfortunately they are only able to fine nightmare universes where he sicker. Eventually Luke gives suze a note from her grandfather who built the maze, where it says to follow Sro-dee in the maze to the right universe. Gary goes to the hospital with the expectation that he'll die and Suze goes back into the maze where she discovers a Universe where she meets her grandfather, Uncle Albert and Grandmother. She isnt welcome in this perfect universe by her grandmother and Uncle but her grandfather gives her a copy of the equation backwards and tells her to go back with Sro-dee to possibly find her original universe and give the note to Luke. When exiting she thinks everything is like it was the beginning except Gary is healthy and Lisa her friend is now dating him. To her horror, Susan discovers that she is now the sick one, and her mom and brother and Lisa wheel her into the porch in a wheelchair.
The book sets up an interesting premise with rules that fluctuate. In a modern context the book is alot like the Twilight Zone with it's ending (or Black Mirror). Unlike Blackbriar, Fingers or Singularity the book ends with a horror note. While the title of the book might allude to the grandfather's safe universe near the end, one could see the title as alluding to death itself as the last universe, as being both inevitable and uncertain. In large part the book is a morality tale about messing or trying to get them better of an uncertain universe (s).
The book sets up an interesting premise with rules that fluctuate. In a modern context the book is alot like the Twilight Zone with it's ending (or Black Mirror). Unlike Blackbriar, Fingers or Singularity the book ends with a horror note. While the title of the book might allude to the grandfather's safe universe near the end, one could see the title as alluding to death itself as the last universe, as being both inevitable and uncertain. In large part the book is a morality tale about messing or trying to get them better of an uncertain universe (s).
brucefarrar's review
4.0
Susan hates pushing her brother around the garden in a wheelchair. It’s not her brother she minds, although they never were very close before he got so sick. It’s the garden that creeps her out. It’s so big and there’s the long dark passageway between overgrown trees before you come to the dark pond where her great-aunt drowned as a girl. Strange exotic flowers grow there. And when you look out the second story bathroom window you can see an overgrown maze in the center of it; but when you walk through the garden you can never find it. Until one day they do. It’s the day after they come back from the pond and the path moves and comes out at a different place than it has ever come out before.
An appropriately chilling story that entertainingly illustrates some of the strange concepts of quantum physics, including an appearance by Shrödinger’s famous cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time. In this garden the physics of the atomic and subatomic world became the physical laws of the larger world, and people, plants, animals, and universes become only clouds of possibilities before their own eyes.
An appropriately chilling story that entertainingly illustrates some of the strange concepts of quantum physics, including an appearance by Shrödinger’s famous cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time. In this garden the physics of the atomic and subatomic world became the physical laws of the larger world, and people, plants, animals, and universes become only clouds of possibilities before their own eyes.
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