Rating: 
Summary: Amazingly Bad
Review: Stone Garden starts off well enough but soon founders under the weight of all its faults. Alice, who is mourning her dead boyfriend, is an unbelievable character on many levels. She is "exquisitely" beautiful, "wise" beyond her years and just about everyone who meets her loves her including the dead boyfriend who had loved her since kindergarten. But, although Ms. Moynahan would like us to believe Alice is lovable, she simply isn't. She is self-obsessed and amazingly obtuse for someone who is supposed to be so wise. She moans throughout the novel of her loss of Matthew, never thinking about HIS loss of life and how he may have suffered in dying. She betrays her new friend, Sigrid, by consorting with the murderer of her babysitter, a strange action by one who lost her love to murder and by a person supposed to be so wise. And Alice and the other characters in the book speak in ways I can't imagine anyone speaking.
" 'She's God's child even though she's a dyke,' (Alice) said. (Her) mother looked annoyed. 'Valerie Hardwood can sleep with small farm animals and still remain the finest human being I've ever known.' 'Mother!' (Alice) raised an eyebrow. 'I'm telling PETA.'" Honestly, who speaks like this? And Alice's awareness of her teacher homosexuality is a bit too precious. Alice also notes that the white kids at her school can't dance but the kids of color can. Puhleeze!
Rating: 
Summary: The Givers and The Takers
Review: "Well, he said, it's like this-you let me teach you so I learned. We can't just be givers in the world and we can't just take. That's why we came on your team darlin'. It wasn't just how pretty you were but the way you let us show our real selves." so said, Frank the prisoner, the convict.
What a magnificent story Molly Moynahan has told in "Stone Garden". This is not just a story for teenagers, it is for everyone. How I wish I knew Alice McGuire, the center of the story, and the narrator. Alice lived with her family in New Jersey. She went to school at a prestigious prep school, and she took advantage of it all. Alice is intelligent and loving and lovely. She and Matthew Swan friends since kindergarten were long in love and planning their future. Matthew went to Mexico with a girl he was breaking up with and never returned. His bones were found a year after he went missing. In the interim Alice re-lives her years as Matthew's special friend. Her family and Matthew's family try to piece everything together to make sense of his death.
Alice, as a Senior project starts volunteering at a writing course at the state prison. She is very effective and the convicts who take part in the writing course seem to brighten and grow under her tutelage. She is a beautiful girl, but she also has the ability to believe in them. Most everyone else has given up on them, but not Alice. She makes a change in their lives and in the process she grows and makes a change in hers.
This is a book about death, and a book about living- or learning to live again. A heartbroken young girl learns about kindness and forgiveness and the realm of hope. Her family remains at the helm of her being, but as she grows she also learns to separate.
This is told with courage and honesty and in a teenager's voice, as a teen would speak; smart, funny, trashy, and modern. A book to be highly recommended. prisrob
Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: As an adult male, I don't often read books about teenages. When it was suggested I read Stone Garden, I began the "task" with some treperdation. My fears were unfounded. Stone Garden is delightful! All the characters, with one exception, were real and easy to care about -- even Matthew who never appears on the pages of the book. (Quite a feat.) The plot moves right along and I DID want to know what happens. When a writer holds your attention with the characters, and keeps you turning the page, I say, "Thank you." I've recommemded to several friends and family, young and old.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: As an adult male, I don't often read books about teenages. When it was suggested I read Stone Garden, I began the "task" with some treperdation. My fears were unfounded. Stone Garden is delightful! All the characters, with one exception, were real and easy to care about -- even Matthew who never appears on the pages of the book. (Quite a feat.) The plot moves right along and I DID want to know what happens. When a writer holds your attention with the characters, and keeps you turning the page, I say, "Thank you." I've recommemded to several friends and family, young and old.
Rating: 
Summary: very disappointing
Review: Hated this book! I thought the first quarter of the book showed promise, but it quickly disintegrated into a novel so unbelievable, trite, and repetitive that I was literally rolling my eyes.
First of all, the prison scenario, that a teenage girl would be allowed to interact and form relationships with these murderers as close as Alice did, got more and more unbelievable as the book went on.
The dialog between characters is made up of total non-sequiturs for one thing, and every character sounds the same; there is no distinction between characters. plus, no one ever says things like, "I'm sorry I'm such a bad brother. I'm sorry your heart is broken."
Rating:
Summary: A page turner that you don't want to end.
Review: I have to admit I'm not a huge reader.. but books like this make me want to change that. What an enjoyable read! The characters are so well developed, I cared about all of them, even the most dysfunctional. The author deals with the realities of loss, anger,strength and ultimately love with truth and candor. These are not stereotypical types we are reading about but complex characters with real emotions and reactions. I was swept up in the story immediately and found the book hard to put down. I look forward to the authors next project!
Rating:
Summary: A Literary Treat From a Magnificent New Voice
Review: In an industry that probably presses out a book (or two) a minute, so-called "new voices" are a dime a dozen. New voices with original, well-written stories are not nearly as abundant. And that's why STONE GARDEN by Molly Moynahan is such a literary treat. Moynahan is a new voice that knows how to tell a story. STONE GARDEN is the poignant tale of not just the untimely death of a life only begun, but also the unsettling effect that death has on the fragile life left behind. At book's start, 17-year-old Matthew Swan is dead. Alice, his best friend for over a decade and once-believed future partner, is left behind to mourn, grieve and adjust to the loss. She seeks mindless, disconnected connections in a few physical encounters that leave her, and this reader, asking the unanswerable question of what it would have been like with Matthew, her silenced soul mate, her dead destiny. She seeks solace in conversations and interactions with her parents, her teachers, her friends, and even the inmates at Rahway prison, where she is teaching writing as a school project. But she doesn't find release and her pain of separation is as palpable as Romeo and Juliet's collective pain. Excuse the comparison to that most famous of first-love couples, but it was unavoidable --- it's there on every page of Moynahan's doomed romance. STONE GARDEN is ripe with surprisingly true teenage dialogue that straddles the worlds of inquisitive childhood and knowing adulthood, stepping back and forth between the two as only adolescents finding maturity and reluctantly shedding innocence can, and as only a very good writer can capture. Screaming she's "not a baby anymore," Alice mounts her pink three-speed Schwinn decorated with pink plastic streamers and takes off down the road to face solo her demons of lost love. "...Matthew Swan had held my face in his hands and told me that he loved me with every part of himself, that he had loved me from the moment he saw me trip over my shoe laces, and while it had taken a while for us to grow up and get it right, we would get it so right that never in the history of love affairs and marriages and big families with beautiful children and grandchildren would anyone get it more right," she reflected with the naïve idealism of a young person struggling with love and death for the first time. Moynahan knows teenagers, their desires and their hauntings --- and she delivers them in STONE GARDEN. But more importantly, she knows people. STONE GARDEN is more that just Alice's story. A strong cast of well-drawn characters lends even more realism to the story. Matthew's mother and siblings for that matter are 'alternative' in their thinking and appearance; their scenes are hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy, and would be laughable if not so sad in their efforts to deal with Matthew's demise. Alice's younger brother, Alf, designs clothes for fun. A teacher by trade, Moynahan's book could even be called a valentine to educators; a particularly appealing character is the able teacher Alice and Matthew had befriended, whom Alice calls on in her times of need. The universal issues of death, love and growing up have always been fodder for good books. But few, in my opinion, have crafted the combination so masterfully as Molly Moynahan in STONE GARDEN. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara from Bookreporter.com
Rating:
Summary: Moynahan knows teenagers, their desires and their hauntings.
Review: In an industry that probably presses out a book (or two) a minute, so-called "new voices" are a dime a dozen. New voices with original, well-written stories are not nearly as abundant. And that's why STONE GARDEN by Molly Moynahan is such a literary treat. Moynahan is a new voice that knows how to tell a story.
STONE GARDEN is the poignant tale of not just the untimely death of a life only begun, but also the unsettling effect that death has on the fragile life left behind. At book's start, 17-year-old Matthew Swan is dead. Alice, his best friend for over a decade and once-believed future partner, is left behind to mourn, grieve and adjust to the loss. She seeks mindless, disconnected connections in a few physical encounters that leave her, and this reader, asking the unanswerable question of what it would have been like with Matthew, her silenced soul mate, her dead destiny. She seeks solace in conversations and interactions with her parents, her teachers, her friends, and even the inmates at Rahway prison, where she is teaching writing as a school project. But she doesn't find release and her pain of separation is as palpable as Romeo and Juliet's collective pain. Excuse the comparison to that most famous of first-love couples, but it was unavoidable --- it's there on every page of Moynahan's doomed romance.
STONE GARDEN is ripe with surprisingly true teenage dialogue that straddles the worlds of inquisitive childhood and knowing adulthood, stepping back and forth between the two as only adolescents finding maturity and reluctantly shedding innocence can, and as only a very good writer can capture. Screaming she's "not a baby anymore," Alice mounts her pink three-speed Schwinn decorated with pink plastic streamers and takes off down the road to face solo her demons of lost love. "...Matthew Swan had held my face in his hands and told me that he loved me with every part of himself, that he had loved me from the moment he saw me trip over my shoe laces, and while it had taken a while for us to grow up and get it right, we would get it so right that never in the history of love affairs and marriages and big families with beautiful children and grandchildren would anyone get it more right," she reflected with the na?ve idealism of a young person struggling with love and death for the first time.
Moynahan knows teenagers, their desires and their hauntings --- and she delivers them in STONE GARDEN. But more importantly, she knows people. STONE GARDEN is more that just Alice's story. A strong cast of well-drawn characters lends even more realism to the story. Matthew's mother and siblings for that matter are 'alternative' in their thinking and appearance; their scenes are hippy-dippy, artsy-fartsy, and would be laughable if not so sad in their efforts to deal with Matthew's demise. Alice's younger brother, Alf, designs clothes for fun. A teacher by trade, Moynahan's book could even be called a valentine to educators; a particularly appealing character is the able teacher Alice and Matthew had befriended, whom Alice calls on in her times of need.
The universal issues of death, love and growing up have always been fodder for good books. But few, in my opinion, have crafted the combination so masterfully as Molly Moynahan in STONE GARDEN.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara, who is the Events Coordinator at the Princeton U-Store.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable - not a great book, but a good story
Review: Ms Moynahan's novel made me laugh, cry, and remember my own first teenage love. As other reviews have alluded, the story is a bit fantastic, with unrealistic twists and turns. But it's a novel, a story, and authors are allowed to play around with reality. Do her characters have depth? Yes. Does she describe her locales well enough that I get a sense of place? Yes. Does the plot keep me intrigued and reading? Yes. Is her prose occasionally melodramatic and at times over-the-top? Yes, but so is life. I laughed as she described the cliques and the classrooms. I wondered at how nonchalant her characters feel towards sex. But I enjoyed her book for what it is, a good story. I was taken away from my daily routine into a world different from my own, and glad for the minivacation. Is it great literature? No. Did it make me feel something? Yes. So, I recommend it as good girly fluff to wallow in on a cold winter afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: High Praise for Stone Garden
Review: Stone Garden, by Molly Moynahan, was really interesting and well-written. Alice is in shock after her fiance suddenly disappears in Mexico and she sees her world and her future go to pieces. This novel was an insightful view into the pains, anxieties and life of a grieving teenager. Alice is a fascinating character with a lot to offer to the story. She is priveleged but we are able to see the destruction and grief that cannot be helped by money or material possesions. Ms. Moynahan really grasps how emotional it would be to lose someone you had planned on staying with forever, and it shows. This book truly makes clear the importance of appreciating the people we love.
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