Review by Booklist Review
Essayist Kelley weaves her personal journey through the tumultuous year of 2020 into a rich tapestry of historical context and botanical exploration. An immunocompromised person, Kelley provides a unique perspective on navigating the challenges of a global pandemic, from the empty grocery shelves to divided communities grappling with how best to respond to COVID-19. In monthly chapters, Kelley takes readers through her personal experiences, interspersing these with meticulous research into past plagues and pandemics. Drawing parallels between historical events and the present, she offers insights into humanity's enduring resilience in the face of adversity. Kelley's expertise shines through, especially in her detailed exploration of seeds, emphasizing their importance from their origins and cultivation practices to their eventual place in the author's personal garden. A Gardener at the End of the World serves as both a reflection on the shared experiences of the pandemic and a celebration of the ways in which the human spirit can find solace and growth in nature's embrace.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Kelley's (Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love & Homegrown Food) new book chronicles her experiences from March 2020 through December 2020 as she tends to her garden in rural Maine and navigates the COVID pandemic. She explores the idea that the spread of seeds and diseases are intertwined, which creates a different type of pandemic journal. As she records the progression of her garden and the pandemic, she weaves in agricultural, medical, and political history. She expresses her frustration with the politicization of the pandemic, but she spends considerably more time on germ theory than on modern politics. Her writing is detailed, engaging, and well-researched; her examinations of her garden, the pandemic, and historical and scientific connections are broad and deep but always clearly explained with an appropriate amount of background information. Kelley is forgiving of both herself and others, and she does not expect perfection in the garden or in people. She thoughtfully assesses people's varied reactions to the pandemic in terms of the five stages of grief. VERDICT A well-written chronicle of a gardening year, a pandemic, and their intertwined histories. Will appeal to a broad range of readers.--Judy Poyer
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An essayist explores how the first year of a global pandemic turned her gardening hobby into an extended reflection on the ways that the spread of food and disease has shaped human history. Kelley, the author of Foodtopia, opens with a contemplation of the "gorgeous possibility" held by the seed packets she bought in January 2020 for the spring growing season in Maine. Three months later, the author was suddenly plunged into the uncertainties created by the pandemic. Lockdowns and her own cancer-compromised immune system forced Kelley to stay at home. In addition to tending her garden on the grim days that followed each other in formless succession, the author researched past pandemics to understand Covid-19's effects on a present in which truths--even scientific ones--had become relative. Soon Kelley began meditating on the interconnectedness of seeds and disease. She learned that the viruses that had caused all major plagues throughout history had a penchant for "hitching rides" from human and other animal hosts. So did seeds, which humans exported and imported, as Columbus did when he brought onions and garlic to Hispaniola, some seeds of which returned to Europe on ships infected with the bacteria that would cause the great syphilis epidemic of the late 15th century. Kelley further notes that language itself developed in ways that suggest a kinship between seeds and viruses. By the mid-1800s, for example, the word "germ"--originally derived from germen, the Latin word for "seed" or "sprout"--came to be associated with germ theory, the idea that microorganisms could invade a body, replicate within it, and cause illness. Interweaving elegantly pastoral descriptions of a far-flung northern landscape haunted by climate change, Kelley transforms musings about a gardening hobby into a rich--and richly instructive--historical journey through human history. An eloquent and thought-provoking narrative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
