The novel slides between the time of the incident and the present, following Hope, who as an adult playwright lives in the shadow of her trauma. After the abduction, Eden and Hope drifted apart, their relationship unable to withstand the weight of the tragedy. As the story progresses, Hope pursues contact with the sister she has fetishized and obsessed over since the night their childhoods were cut short. Dark, eloquent, and bold, Kleine’s...latest is a fierce tale of survival and sisterhood.
As a novel about post-traumatic stress, Eden is both fascinating and maddening. Hope often seems to be disassociating even as she reports on the facts of the kidnapping ... Her restricted range of emotions is problematic, but it may have been the author’s intention. Eden is not a novel about PTSD, it’s a chronicle of firsthand experience. Hope’s robotic point of view might evoke a range of emotions in readers who long for a connection with the hero, but Hope is suffering ... The grown-up part of Hope’s life as a lovelorn, struggling playwright living in New York City is riveting. A novel about how Hope navigated that world would have been enough to seduce any reader, but the fact that the chapters alternate back and forth from childhood trauma to angst-driven New York living was hard to navigate especially when chapters in New York detailing performance art followed closely on the heels of chapters about childhood abuse. Hard not to skip right over New York mishmash to find out how the protagonist will outsmart the kidnapper.
Trauma, and its way of overwhelming all that surrounds it, poses distinct challenges to narrative. Because it is resolutely internal and unfalsifiable (who can determine whether pain is real but the sufferer?), narrative explorations of trauma tend to be voice-driven. Eden is the rare instance of a trauma novel that privileges plot over subjectivity ... At times the novel reads like a paint-by-numbers critique of the society Boomers built: mothers reject motherhood, divorce endangers children, people join communes as a way to avoid pain or responsibility ... Kleine has a tendency of writing secondary characters as villains and protagonists as innocents. Without enough insight into Eden, her unintelligible cruelty seems designed only to flatter Hope and accentuate her inherent goodness. This flatness makes Hope an unsatisfying protagonist.
Nonlinear in style and somewhat uneven in pacing, the story includes a small narrative thread based on Hope's life within the artistic fringes of New York: Would she and her cadre of friends have chosen the creative life knowing the financial strain that might lie ahead? ... Performance artist Kleine (Calf) portrays a young woman's bumpy and sometimes uncomfortable journey toward resolution and self-reliance in this novel of discovery and healing.
This is a compelling tale, and Hope, as the lost and floundering narrator, is an appealingly honest, if somewhat frustrating, character. But for so striking a story, it is surprisingly lacking where is should be stirring. Kleine...falls just short of impact, or insight. As a result, the book—which has all the potential elements for excitement and originality—falls prey to banality ... An unlikely combination of both absorbing and flat.
Kleine’s fascinating second novel...follows Hope, a struggling New York City playwright in her 30s. Her affordable sublet situation has just been derailed by the unexpected return of the owner. Having lost her girlfriend of seven years, her mom to cancer, and now her apartment, Hope is adrift. But Hope’s story goes deeper ... Kleine’s novel is somewhat overambitious and stuffed with a few too many characters and narrative threads, but what ultimately emerges is a gripping portrait of the lingering effects of trauma.
