The Garden of Last Days

A Novel

By: Andre Dubus III

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works.

Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam.

Meanwhile, another man, A. J., has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.

From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity.

Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the listener by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus' number-one best seller - House of Sand and Fog - and has an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

©2008 Andre Dubus III (P)2008 Brilliance Audio

A big disappointment!

I loved House of Sand and Fog, so was really looking forward to this one. However, I plowed my way through 2 hours and found it to be a collosal bore. In addition, the narrator was one of the least interesting I've heard and did nothing to make me want to continue. I was unable to finish this one.

Disappointing, nothing like house of sand and fog

I kept listening thinking it was going to come together but it never did.This book has no purpose, the characters are uninteresting and the writer has you in each charaters head and they think and say the same things over and over and over again.
What I especially didn't like was the little sound effect that was used everytime a person was supposed to be speaking on a phone, or calling from outside, or listening to a tape. It was ridiculous to have the reader suddenly sound like he was reading into a voice changer so we would know that the conversation was taking place on the telephone.
I did not like anything about this book.

Going nowhere. Slowly.

A painful listen. Instead of using stream of consciousness as a device to highlight the motivation of one character in a specific moment, we spend nearly the entire book inside the heads of all the characters. And their mental meandering is not all that interesting...
The plot consists of disparate threads which one hopes will all somehow come together but which mostly do not. The ending left me shaking my head and kicking myself for having listened to the whole thing. Just awful!

Waste of Time

I struggle to get to the end hoping it would
get better. It only got worse. This is the worse
book I've downloaded.

Thoughtless people doing foolish things

If you are really interested in learning what a 9/11 hijacker felt about America just before his 'big event', here's the book for you. (hint; he's conflicted about women and Americans.)

Otherwise join a group of emotionally damaged people as they go from one mistake to another. Each step is preceded by such deluded justification that it made me want to slap them. Like 'what part of essentially kidnapping a child from from a strip joint's parking lot and then giving her Benadryl to calm down' did you think was a good idea?

I rarely give up on books once I start, but boy, this was a challenge.

Drawn Out and Pointless

This book really felt like a waste of time. All of the characters are uninteresting, average, everyday people, including the highjacker. They're self-absorbed and whiny and it is very difficult, from the first moment, to really care what happens to them. The whole book felt like I was watching some yokel being interviewed on the news and feeling embarrassed to be watching it. The use of September 11th as a backdrop feels cheap, given the shallowness of the characters.

The narrator was okay, though he did make the women awfully whiny, though I never could decide whether that was his fault or the author's.