Dear Agent,
If you’re reading this in 2021, chances are you Googled ‘Karen Myna Cantor author’. If you’re seeing this post after 2021, then you’re probably kicking yourself for not repping Karen’s book. Last week, Karen and I wrapped our critique partner swap. She’s fun to work with, professional in her communication, and full of beautiful stories. Here’s why her manuscript ought to be published.
THE GARDEN AT THE END OF THE WORLD is a YA contemporary novel about Eliza, a high school girl who is trepidatious about her greenhouse internship on an island off the coast of North Carolina. Working with plants comes easy enough to Eliza, but she’s mortified her new peers will prickle at her disability. Eliza has dysautonomia, a condition that makes her relatively frail and easily exhausted. Throughout her childhood, Eliza has coped with stress by obsessing over grandiose apocalyptic scenarios—driving her inward to a place of self-doubt. When the internship blows apart in a catastrophic snowstorm, Eliza must learn to appreciate small victories in the face of real, mortal danger. She must accept herself as-is, and recognize the hero she was already.
Before story’s end, Eliza will surprise herself and enamor the reader with her tenacity, compassion, and perseverance. In her condition, normal tasks like walking 100 yards in the snow take on super-heroic proportions. In this way, Karen subtly subverts the disaster genre’s machismo archetypes. Her story returns again and again to the power of community. Eliza is surrounded by a winning ensemble cast, who reflect her insecurities. Yossi, the love interest, is charismatic, self-assured, and blind. Their romance and partnership in the face of overwhelming circumstance is a beautiful arc of mutual growth and acceptance. If this is starting to sound like an after-school special, please know their romance peaks in an inventive and sexy scene involving a flamethrower.
As a writer, I’m most impressed on a technical level by Karen’s handling of the ensemble. Roughly a dozen characters revolve around Eliza, each with their own palpable arc. As they plot and react to increasingly dire survival scenarios, their interdependent stories point toward a steadfast faith in compassion. This book is in some ways an answer to Lord Of The Flies (which is not to say GARDEN is a parable, or that Karen denies the kids’ capability for sinister machinations). Whereas Golding painted a downard spiral with no exit, Karen subverts the disaster ethos with feminist power—by upholding the virtues of hospitality, peacemaking, tenderness, and compassion.
Frequently, Eliza and the other high schoolers will face some horrendous dilemma: a food riot, a fire, a micro-pandemic. Then, rather than rush headlong to beat the problem with muscles, the characters talk it over. Carefully, options are weighed, and these mini-war room scenes create an anti-war effect—diplomacy wins. This isn’t hippie-dippie delusion—Karen subtly brings her characters to the edge of paranoia and mass violence—it’s a transformative narrative written with mindfulness in mind.
By story’s end, most of the characters will have experienced frailty in some way, until they’re all mincemeat in the face of the devastating snow. For a story with several beats of laugh-out-loud humor and playful romance, the central disaster is harrowing. Karen wisely avoids the singular event plot structure trap of so many disaster movies. I.e., while a volcano only erupts once, a snowstorm piles up problems continually. Through her relationships with her peers (who intimidated her at the start!) and the oppression of the snow, Eliza must recognize that they all face ‘little apocalypses’, and it is how the characters choose to face a busted world that defines them. In the face of the snow, each character is one broken ankle away from becoming as frail as Eliza—but it was never the frailty that really counted.
I can’t think of higher praise for Karen’s book than this—I want my daughter to read it in a few years, hardcover copy, and I would read it again tomorrow. As a work of entertainment, THE GARDEN AT THE END OF THE WORLD is a gripping read, both full of and inspiring transformation. As a piece of art, Karen has explored the disaster genre through a compelling and gracious feminist lens. Her writing style is well suited for YA audiences: often economical and utilitarian, in equal measures funny, haunting, and bleak, with many savory, beautiful passages. And in a truly important sense, Karen is operating on the frontier of stories about disability. In that way in particular, this story is essential reading. Eliza belongs in a new canon of heroes. As a disabled parent, I want my daughter to grow up reading stories like hers.
Phil Gross, Game Designer 