Garden for the Blind is a more idiosyncratic book than one might realize after a cursory read, a provocative and unconventional meditation on privilege, fate, and the city of Detroit. Kelly Fordon’s debut in full-length fiction is a collection of closely interlinked short stories that follow a small cast of characters from childhood to middle age. One of the satisfactions of reading linked-story collections is the sensation, a bit like time travel, of being guided through someone’s life by someone (think Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts) who knows all the most important moments to show you.
~Tyler Baldwin
In her new collection, Garden of the Blind, Fordon has mastered that difficult art of writing stories that stand alone but that also share characters, places, and incidents to form something that feels almost like an episodic novel. She has meticulously constructed the chronology of her characters' lives through forty years of development, from 1974 to 2014. That may be the reason that this collection feels so satisfying. When we read short stories we often feel as if we've looked through a small window at one tiny moment of the characters' lives. Here, we get to do that and then also get to see other moments through other windows.
~Keith Taylor
In Kelly Fordon’s new collection, Garden for the Blind, place predominates. That place is economically challenged Detroit and the affluent suburbs that surround the city. The race and class challenges afforded by having people of vastly different means living in close proximity are at the center of the book. . . . As in life, there are no perfect endings. Fordon tackles the messy, complex truth about race and class in her interesting stories.
~Ellen Birkett Morris
Grosse Pointer Kelly Fordon has authored a tremendous, beautifully written book. . . Garden for the Blind is a must-read for contemporary society, a kaleidoscope of the human condition.
~Carrie Cunningham
Simply written, these stories reveal how easy it is to be misunderstood and how difficult it is to reconcile past mistakes.
~Kirkus Reviews
In Garden for the Blind, Kelly Fordon has situated her stories such that they dazzle with the immediacy of deeply felt life even as together they awe with the epic sweep of a life lived. Whether set in Greater Detroit, the Caribbean, or the Great Lakes region of northern Ohio, each story finds its peculiar curiosity in the midst of blight and rends the reader's heartstrings with the love the character has for it. An unforgettable first collection.
~Daniel Mueller, Author of Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey and How Animals Mate
A strikingly atmospheric and psychologically acute collection of linked stories about the long-lasting reverberations of a childhood accident.
~Jenny Offill, Author of Dept. of Speculation
Kelly Fordon's profound and deeply moving stories ask how you deal with the unbearable truths of your life: the missteps and missed chances. Fordon's characters have to navigate a world of cynical politics and easy drugs. They long for their own identity but are lost in the demands the world makes of them. They want a set of rules in which to live their lives of easy comfort and killing neighborhoods. These stories are at once unsentimental and tender and you won't forget them.
~Gloria Whelan
The rich are different from you and me . . . as Kelly Fordon so movingly conveys in her unflinching look at the lives of wealthy white auto executives and their families in the paradisaical suburbs that surround an ever-decaying inner-city Detroit in the waning decades of the twentieth century and the start of the new millennium. Fordon's beautifully rendered stories chart the terrible tensions created by polarities in race, gender, and social class and the efforts of one young woman in particular to transcend those divides and figure out what it means to be a moral human being.
~Eileen Pollack
Garden for the Blind is one of the most intricately and beautifully constructed works of fictions I've read. It's a gem made of many facets. It is full of characters and interiors—both physical and psychological—that are so fully realized they are impossible to think of strictly on the page. They love, and exist, and this is both an intense and page-turning adventure and a work of stories, over which you will linger, with awe at the precision and grace of its sentences and images. Kelly Fordon is a writer to admire, and to keep an eye on, and this work is one I'm never going to forget.
~Laura Kasischke
Each of Kelly Fordon's stories is perceptive, memorable, and moving—but taken together, they compose something far more significant: a tragicomic elegy for American youth as we knew it in the late twentieth century. I loved this book, and I will be haunted by its recurring characters for some time to come.
~Julia Glass
Garden for the Blind is a unique and constantly engaging collection of linked stories in which we are richly rewarded by a greater scope and a larger sense of the generations in play in this entertaining array of fictions. This book is a true joy to read, and a wonderful debut.
~Fred Leebron
In Garden for the Blind, Kelly Fordon has situated her stories such that they dazzle with the immediacy of deeply felt life even as together they awe with the epic sweep of a life lived. Whether set in Greater Detroit, the Caribbean, or the Great Lakes region of northern Ohio, each story finds its peculiar curiosity in the midst of blight and rends the reader's heartstrings with the love the character has for it. An unforgettable first collection.
~Daniel Mueller
Literary Hub's The Best Short Stories from the Heart of the Country Also from Wayne State University Press comes Garden for the Blind. These interconnected stories are set in Detroit in the years 1974-2012. Here, too, we see children of relative affluence damaged by their surroundings and feel the visceral contrasts between prosperous suburbs and dangerous neighborhoods. A rash decision made by Alice Townley and her friend Mike haunts the pair for decades, and its consequences reverberate well beyond their families and friends to strangers. Neglect is an important theme, and Fordon makes clear how vital it is that we take care of each other. Despite the comforts and protection money ostensibly offers, teens are vulnerable to the indifference of their parents. The title story is especially exquisite. In it, vandals destroy a garden at a school for the blind. A monk who lives across the street, a divorced man who has lost both wife and children, struggles to understand how to rise above those who do damage. Once again, the lines between privileged and poor are crossed only through the heart.
~Donna Baer Stein
