A Garden of Aloes by G. Davies Jandrey

The Permanent Press, 2008

Starting Over
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

Gayle Davies Jandrey spent 28 years teaching public high schoolers and this experience, no doubt, has enabled her to create an incredible cast of real characters in her debut work of fiction, A Garden of Aloes.

Jandrey does an outstanding job crafting six characters’ (all female) distinct voices, particularly twelve year old Sam, the character readers will have a chance to meet first in A Garden of Aloes. In this suspenseful, witty, and poignant page-turner you will not have to read several chapters before getting to the juicy scenes. A Garden of Aloes is straight off heartrending and humorous.

In order to escape an abusive relationship, Leslie, along with her two daughters, twelve year old Sam and sixteen year old Audrey, trade in a well-to-do life and a big beautiful home in northern California for a poor life in Tucson Arizona. They move into a cockroach infested converted motor court, the Oasis Apartment, in a neighborhood swarming with winos, prostitutes, and crackheads. “The street is called The Miracle Mile. It’s a miracle all right—a miracle that we weren’t robbed or worse,” says twelve year old Sam about her new life and new neighborhood. The other three characters in A Garden of Aloes are Chablee, a biracial teen who befriends Audrey; Eden, a topless dancer and Chablee’s mother, befriends Leslie; and Dee, a 400 pound 40 year old with multiple personalities, befriends twelve year old Sam. Although the characters are somewhat dissimilar, they share something in common: abuse, abandonment, and life at the Oasis Apartment. But they “…learn to be like aloes—tough on the outside so they can stay soft within.” —Kirkus

Although Jandrey’s characters are fictitious, Sam does have Jandrey’s childhood fear of vampires. “On nights when I awoke too full of dread to go back to sleep, it was my very own sister who’d let me crawl into the safest part of her twin bed, no small sacrifice since I was a rather chunky ten-year-old at the time,” recalls Jandrey in her Acknowledgments.

A Garden of Aloes made me realize that I should take nothing for granted because what’s here today could very well be gone tomorrow, and just like the characters in A Garden of Aloes, starting life over can happen to anyone.

A Garden of Aloes will bring tears to your eyes and have you rolling with laughter. But do not get it twisted; the unfortunate state of affairs of the women who resides at the Oasis is no laughing matter.