When they were teenagers, Hope and Eden were kidnapped by a man who claimed to be their father’s friend. They both physically came out of the woods, but they left something of themselves behind. In Andrea Kleine’s Eden, we follow Hope almost twenty years later as she tentatively goes on a quest to track down her sister, who went off the grid shortly after the kidnapping. It’s been years for Hope, her sister, and their parents, but they haven’t really moved on. The kidnapping derailed everyone’s lives. No one is healthy in this book, but Eden is not a catalog of mental illness so much as it explores the impossibility of “letting go” of trauma in the way that Hope’s friends and family constantly exhort her to do.
Hope is a struggling playwright in New York City at the beginning of the novel, when she gets a letter informing her that the man who kidnapped her and Eden years ago is up for parole. (This is really the cherry on top of a bad month because Hope’s mother had just died of lung cancer.) The local district attorney wants Hope and Eden to testify to make sure he stays in jail. The DA also suspects that the kidnapper murdered a girl shortly before he took Hope and Eden into the woods. If Hope and Eden testify, maybe the guy will be convicted of murder, too. So Hope halfheartedly goes home. She talks to her father, Eden’s mother, and anyone else she can find who remembers Eden.
I was astonished by the selfishness of the parents in Hope and Eden’s life. Suriya, Eden’s mother, took off when Eden was a child and lives a peripatetic life as a hippie at a series of communes and collectives. Hope and Eden’s father seems to be content to be a sad sack who castigates himself with his failings as a parent, so much so that others have to comfort him. Luce, who was the father’s girlfriend at the time, at least has the self-awareness to admit that she didn’t like being a stand-in mother. It’s little wonder that Eden left and Hope has become so closed off to others that she’s emotionally crippled.
Eden has the benefit of being a unique account of the aftermath of trauma. I’ve never seen anything like it. But just because this book is unique doesn’t necessarily make it enjoyable. I daresay this book will make readers angry because of the terribly self-absorbed parents. Hope clearly needed and still needs help, but most of the people in her life are incapable of providing that help. That said, how does one help someone who goes through what Hope and Eden did? The only thing we can say for sure is that you can’t just tell them to “move on” and “let go.”
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 10 July 2018.