Short Fantasy Story Review – Stephanie Potter – Gardening

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2015 Mammoth /Robinsons Press – Spoiler alerts A young mute girl, traumatized by anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe in the early 1930’s, arrives penniless in London where she is taken in by a convent where she starts working on the gardens. She notices an unusual number of adder snakes, including one with two heads in the garden. An inner voice guides her to an obscure Latin text in the convent library which she is able to read and decipher without having learned Latin. The text teaches her that the fall of Adam & Eve was grossly misunderstood or deliberately obfuscated. The tree of knowledge was actually there to teach us about healing, which also meant having to suffer pain that would need healing. Adam focussed too much on the suffering, and brutally supressed Eve’s gentler healing beliefs and set the church on the wrong course. Her efforts to share her discovery leads to her disappearance and that of the text, suppressed by the Church her heretical ideas challenged. With that the story ends. An intriguing conspiracy theory notion that is suggested and then never explored further. Arthur Chappell