The Wonder Garden — Lauren Acampora

A coolly incisive portrait of the intersecting lives of one small Connecticut town, Lauren Acampora's superb
debut The Wonder Garden announces her as'a keen and brilliant observer of the strangeness that is American suburbia. A man strikes an under-the-table deal with a surgeon to spend a few quiet seconds closer to his wife than he's ever been; a young soon-to-be mother looks on in paralyzing astonishment as her husband walks away from a fifteen-year career in advertising at the urging of his spirit animal; an elderly artist risks more than he knows when he's commissioned by his newly-arrived neighbors to produce the work of a lifetime.

In The Wonder Garden, Lauren Acampora gathers with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These interwoven stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, the supposedly ordinary lives they lead, and the secrets they try so desperately to hide. Acampora's characters are neighbors, lovers, friends who, beneath their dreamy suburban surface, are nothing like they appear. These intricate tales reveal at each turn the unseen battles we play out behind drawn blinds, the creeping truths from which we distract ourselves, and the massive dreams we haul quietly with us and hold close.