The Wishing Garden Book

The Wishing Garden
Savannah Dawson makes her living at an advertising agency, creating commercials that link milk consumption to true love. But when it comes to tarot cards, she isn't making things up. And she has never picked a bad card—until the Three of Swords appears in her own fortune one night, promising sorrow...and a letter from her estranged mother reveals her father is dying.

With her rebellious teenage daughter in tow, Savannah goes to Arizona expecting the worst. And her fears are confirmed. Her mother is as distant as ever, her father will never recover, and the secretive wood carver helping her father build his final wish is stirring up feelings she has no use for. But hope still has a fighting chance in the town of Prescott. As the summer air grows heavy with scents from her father's lush garden, Savannah will discover a whole new magic...the kind that grows—quite literally—on trees.

Publishers Weekly

HThere's magic in Yorke's second novel, magic in the prose, the details and the exquisite characterizations. Divorced advertising executive and Tarot-card reader Savannah Dawson takes her 15-year-old daughter, Emma, from their San Francisco home to Arizona so that they can spend time with Savannah's estranged mother, Maggie, and her father, Doug, who is dying of cancer. Then Savannah meets Jake, a secretive stranger who is building a special bench for her father's garden; at the same time, Emma meets Eli, the local bad boy who works for Jake. Although the relationships between these four characters form the basis for much of the drama in the story, the romantic elements remain secondary to the explorations of each individual's personality. Readers enter a world where poetry and soil speak for a dying man, where love can create as well as destroy and where all characters are complicit in each other's pain, either by choice or by chance. Yorke (Magic Spells) even has Jake's dog, Sasha, narrate some scenes, and those, together with the scenes revealing Maggie and Doug's difficult, complex, and ultimately loving relationship, are the most poignant in the book. Readers who enjoy contrary characters will especially prize the paradoxes in this well-executed novel. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.