Review by ab2020 -- Gardening With Guns by AJ Wootton

[ab2020]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Gardening With Guns" by AJ Wootton.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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If you don’t believe that reality really is more challenging, more surprising, and more terrifying than fiction, you might want to read Gardening With Guns by AJ Wootton. Like any good memoir, Gardening with Guns will make you question your privilege, your identity, and your society. It will open your eyes to the experiences of an ordinary-yet-extraordinary individual and will make you wonder what you might have missed had you never encountered this book.

Gardening with Guns is the story of AJ Wootton (known as Amber in the book) and her struggles through trauma, grief, and marriage. The story begins with the death of her father, which leads her to revisit her difficult and harrowing childhood. Her parents divorced when she was in middle school, and her mother and father both remarried. However, her mother’s new marriage brought tension and violence into her life. Her stepfather sexually abused her and her mother was powerless to stop him. This made Amber’s adolescence extremely difficult.

Amber recalls these events just as her marriage of several decades begins to fall apart. Her husband suddenly comes out as gay, and she struggles with the potential consequences of divorce. She is the mother to three children, and she worries that she will inadvertently cause them to suffer the same horrors that she suffered as a child. As she journeys through these difficult months of grief and divorce, Amber finds solace in her brothers, her coworkers, and a new and promising romance.

Gardening with Guns is simultaneously gripping and touching. The story is nuanced, accessible, and candid. The book moves at a gentle pace, with relatively short chapters and a fitting combination of reflective (thought-based) and narrative (action-based) passages. The characters are fully developed and vividly portrayed. The author displays clear biases in her narration, but such is the nature of memoir; Wootton’s openness about her emotions and perceptions makes her story more sympathetic.

Wootton is unquestionably a strong writer. The book contained a few grammatical errors, but none of these errors caused any confusion for me. The prose flows well and the author’s diction, imagery, and style are impeccable. I really could not point to anything I disliked about Gardening with Guns; in fact, I enjoyed the book tremendously. I rate this book 4 out of 4 stars, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys memoirs or who simply wants to read an extremely absorbing story. You will not regret giving it a try.

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Gardening With Guns
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[Erin Painter Baker]

Nicely written review. I think this may be the first one I have seen of this book that mentions that the author's own divorce is happening and that is triggering some of her fear and anxiety (which makes total sense).

[Thehorselover]

For me, the way the author meshed he reflective and narrative chapters was a bit confusing, unless you never put the book down. I think she could have done a better job of bringing the reader up to speed at the beginning of each chapter so they knew where they were at.