Hothouse bloom

An artist changes her life after inheriting an apple orchard in Wohlers's ethereal debut. After Anna's grandfather Joe, whom she scarcely knew, bequeaths his orchard to her, Anna arrives and quickly loses interest in painting. She chafes at her well-intentioned sheep farmer neighbors, who don't understand her idealistic drive "to feel the depth of pleasure in the orchard's slow changes," given the grueling reality of farm work. The arrangement grows complicated after she invites her couch-surfing friend Jan to stay at the orchard, where he continues working on his quixotic essay about the painter Charles Burchfield. Jan frets about Anna's abandonment of her career and her tendency to shield herself from life outside the orchard, causing her to wish she hadn't invited him. As the fall arrives and the harvest shows significant problems, Anna reluctantly seeks help from an expert and participates in a local farmer's market, realizing that if she wants to keep her idyll going, she can't be fully isolated. Wohlers draws in the reader with her depiction of her main character's esoteric inner life, even if it verges on precious ("She tried to pass entire days without thinking a single human word"). The author's strong voice carries this otherwise gauzy tale of a woman's search for meaning. Agent: Alex Reubert, HG Literary. (Aug.)

A young woman inherits an apple orchard and sets out to realign her life with the rhythms of the natural world. Anna, a former painter in her late 20s, has inherited a remote apple orchard upon her grandfather Joe's death. Joe was a distant figure, yet in the lush, permaculture farm Joe has left her, Anna finds not only traces of her grandfather's essential warmth, but also a path forward into a "world of immense gentleness" where she can "expand her understanding of a single instant out into infinitude." In the solitude and constant labor of the orchard, Anna feels she is progressing toward a kind of perfection found in a deliberate and "fundamental rearrangement of the world." This idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Jan, a peripatetic friend from her old life, and the lurking presences of Gil and Tamara, experienced neighbors who are helpful in running the orchard but also express a proprietary feeling toward her land and the way they think she should be farming it. Jan's inability to understand the "inhuman anonymity with which [Anna is] living" destabilizes the psychic connection Anna feels with the orchard, yet the real threat to her new life comes when the practical needs of the harvest force Anna to bring more people in to work, reframing the land as a monetized business and changing Anna's relationship to the beings who inhabit it. Gorgeous, erudite, and ungoverned, the book suffers from some of the same unhappiness as its main character. The demands it makes on the reader to navigate its often overwrought, or simply untranslatable, ethos betrays what seems to be its originating impulse: to resist the call to "decipher…the world" and instead let form and technique "leach waterily into one another, like salt and soil." A little less--fewer similes, fewer flights of transcendental thought, fewer iterations of the orchard's inhuman beauty--would have given the reader more to work with when the novel reached its conclusion. Ambitious in scope, serious of purpose, yet lacking a distinctness that would have allowed all its facets to shine. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.