The Divine Gardener's Handbook
Or What To Do If Your Girlfriend Accidentally Turns Off the Sun: A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
WARNING: MAY CAUSE REBELLION, RADICAL GARDENING, AND ROMANCE.
“Pure chaotic good.”
—Julie Leong, USA Today bestselling author of The Teller of Small Fortunes
The Divine Gardener’s Handbook is a sapphic dystopian fantasy of botanical sabotage, a questionable god named Saul, and a woman falling for the person most likely to ruin her life.
In a Jenga-stacked megacity where glowing blue flowers hum in the dark and palace doors open into secret worlds, getting a job in the Divine Gardens is almost impossible—like being plucked from obscurity by a carnival claw machine. But Cyprin has spent her whole life trying.
Her only chance is winning the annual flower pageant, dominated for five years by Purcell: brilliant head gardener, unbearable rival, and the one person Cyprin can’t stop thinking about. When Cyprin cheats her way to victory, she’s thrust into a world of sentient plants, ancient secrets, and a God who turns out to be just some exhausted man with a very good garden.
What begins as rivalry, heated glaring, and increasingly personal acts of warfare spirals into something much more dangerous. As rebellion spreads through the city and the truth beneath the Gardens begins to unravel, Cyprin and Purcell find themselves caught between ambition, obsession, and the terrifying possibility of understanding each other completely.
Even if they burn the whole world down in the process.
The Divine Gardener’s Handbook is perfect for readers who like their fantasy weird, heartfelt, and a little unhinged.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Snow's adult debut (after the YA novel The Duke Steals Hearts and Other Body Parts) is a twisty and humorous sapphic take on a classic rivals-to-lovers plot. In the near future, scrappy heroine Cyprin lives in the megacity Asperia, which is "built on the bones of the old," leaving "a wealth of history, actual preserved buildings and tunnels a person could walk through" underneath it. She's a nobody working in one of the giant apple orchards that feed the city's seven billion people, but she dreams of a job in the Divine Gardens, the impossibly beautiful and well-off enclave of 10,000 elite gardeners directly overseen by the Petaled Divine. When her creative but illegal method of winning the Gardens' annual flower pageant gets her the attention of Purcell, the current Head Gardener, Cyprin quickly discovers another dream: to annoy uptight, rule-following Purcell as much as possible, ideally for the rest of their lives. But there is something deeply wrong with the Gardens, its god, and the layers buried beneath its fertile soil—and the deeper Cyprin and Purcell dig, the more the women risk bringing their whole world crumbling down. Snow's sharp character work and snappy dialogue rocket readers through this wildly inventive tale. Tamsyn Muir fans will eat it up.
