Rating: 
Summary: Angst in the fast lane
Review: There are many reasons not to feel sympathy for Moynahan's characters--poor little rich kids at a school for priviledged youth, with all the attendant problems. She reaches beyond the superficiality, however, and gives us Alice, who, at seventeen, is facing the death of the boy she loved, with the self-centered angst only a teenager can demonstrate.The teens are drawn very convincingly, the adults less so, and this is a surprising and satisfying read.
Rating: 
Summary: I can't quite put my finger on it...but I loved it
Review: There's something about this book. I finished it in a couple of days. I couldn't put it down. I think it's the characters and spot-on voices. There are some books where the characters feel so real, you know? Like they are people you could know or knew. The dialogue flows, never seems forced -- more like a real life conversations. This is one of those books.
The characters have that vibe of being slightly outside of the status quo of regular teenagers -- they're funny and mature and a little strange and have the vocabularies of college students. The book itself is by turns comedic and sad and profound and realistic and slightly off-center but always very engaging.
Rating:
Summary: An author who has been there, or does amazing research
Review: Towards the conclusion of Molly Moynihan's cloying and manipulative novel "Stone Garden," her angst-ridden protagonist laments, "How sad to be without a soul." That one sentence neatly encapsulates the essence of Moynihan's writing, soulless. Under the pretense of examining the devastating impact of unexpected death on sensitive adolescents, Moynihan manages to include every conceivable plot contrivance, cardboard characterization and tear-saturated sigh she can muster. The result is a dreary, unbelievable story that achieves the worst possible result: readers who lack sympathy for her protagonist and who could care less about the anguish the protagonist presumably feels. Alice McGuire attends a quasi-private progressive high school in suburban New Jersey. Her classmates, when not busy on cold fusion physics projects, chumming around with budding rap stars, sojourning in Europe or writing operas, aren't so much late teens but weary, jaded adults pretending to be younger. Wise, but stupid beyond her years, Alice mourns the loss of her one-true-love, Matthew Swan, a seemingly perfect young man who just happens to die in Mexico while accompanying a bereft female "friend" who needed his comfort while scoring drugs. Why Matthew would travel thousands of miles with a girl whom he barely knows while leaving his heartthrob Alice behind defies logic, but, as much else in "Stone Garden," believability has long before checked out. There is not one character who is credible. Not Alice's father, whose goofy laid-back acquiescence is atonement for his adulterous affair with Matthew's drug-addicted mother. Not the earnest and oh-so-wonderful lesbian teacher, Ms. Hardwood, who, in addition to falling in love with the village blacksmith (yes, there is still a village blacksmith...), carries her own long-lost heterosexual lover in her memory. Not in the long-suffering Sigrid, who witnessed the murder of her babysitter by a criminal who coincidentally is inovlved in a prison writing project assisted by, naturally, Alice. Molly Moynahan should know better. As a teacher, she knows that teens are more complex than the young men and women she presents. As a capable writer, she knows that readers deserve genuine conflict and realistic dialogue. Regardless of age, unexpected death engenders complicated, volatile and unpredictable responses from the living. "Stone Garden" betrays the possibilities of this terrible circumstance, instead preferring overripe, implausible commentary. In this sense, Moynahan's novel is false and fraudulent.
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