Why a Booktrail?
What are the dark secrets lurking beneath the stunning natural beauty of a dying timber town?
The Gardener of Eden
What you need to know before your trail
A mysterious beachcomber appears one day on the coastal bluffs near the small town of Carverville, whose best days are long behind it. Who is he, and why has he returned after nearly forty years? Carverville’s prodigal son, James, serendipitously finds work at the Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages, a gentrified motel, but soon finds his homecoming taking a sinister turn when he and a local teenager make a gruesome discovery, which force him to reckon with the ghosts of his past—and the dangers of the present. Rumors, distrust, and conspiracies spread among the townsfolk, all of them seemingly trapped in their claustrophobic and isolated world. But is there something even more sinister at work here than the mere fear of outsiders?
Travel Guide
Travel BookTrail style to “Carverville” (California)
Not a real place but a forgotten timber town which is based on several in the California landscape in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains.
It’s a town which sounds bleak and raw. The weather and landscape match the events of the story. A man’s return to a changed landscape.
“Infrastructure projects had transformed South Carverville but the estuary still curled like a giant questions mark in the Yono River Valley. From the 2800s until his adolescence in the late twentieth century, this had been the historic nuclear of Carverville’s fishing industry.”
“Farther inland on Yono estuary, at the Eastern end of the parking lot of the old cannery built of red brick, with a kiln and chimney on one end, and a received and shipping dock on the other was now a multilevel mini-mall emblazoned with the predictable name The Old Cannery.”
Eden Seaside Resort
John returns home and gets a job here. It;s close to downtown Carverville and from the bluff, the real rawness and remoteness of the town is apparent.
Carverville had been a company town. “Back in the 1970s, old -timers claimed the place got its look during Prohibition when Mulligan’s became the town’s very own House of the Rising Sun.
The area is known for its authentic Carverville smoked salmon and potted crab.
Booktrailer Review
A tale of a cloistered old timber town with more secrets to share than you can shake a stick at…if you excuse the tree pun. There’s lots to like here and least of all the descriptions of the sad, faded old town that is Carverville…
Read TheBookTrail’s bookreview The Gardener of Eden by David Downie
Booktrail Boarding Pass: The Gardener of Eden
Destination : “Carverville” California Author/Guide: David Downie Departure Time: 2000s
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