Fun fact: If you watch Midsommar and The Wizard of Oz at exactly the same time… it will sound horrible. But then you’ll probably have a lucid dream and it will feel a little something like Lost in the Garden.

I need to be honest: I don’t think this book was ready for publication. I mean, did the editors ALSO go to Almanby? Lost in the Garden is a vividly-written summer road trip story about three friends who decide to go to a forbidden village. As they get closer to the redoubtable township of Almanby, things start to go wrong. They start becoming other people, suddenly remembering false memories, chasing after things that might not be there, and getting lost in houses that cannot be physically possible. Lost in the Garden is a blend of House of Leaves, The Wizard of Oz, the 1967 TV series The Prisoner, and the slow-paced fever dream quality of 2019’s Midsommar. At least, that’s how I would advertise this in theory. The truth is, Lost in the Garden is sprawling and unstructured, taking over half the book to even get to the forbidden village. Clocking in at nearly 450 pages, it’s about 250 pages too long. Look, I understand the allure of a slow summer: of a long road trip across the U.K., of the pointless conversations we have when we’re endlessly bored. But this could’ve been a very effective novella. As an already overlong novel, its momentum is simply too slow.

One of the most effective mechanics of the 2019 film Midsommar—which Leslie’s novel is to some degree influenced by—is that the film’s director, Ari Aster, dilates time. Because the sun is always out in midsummer, it’s difficult to tell how much time has passed from one moment to the next… if any time has passed at all. In Lost in the Garden, Leslie tries to evoke a similar sense of eternal summer, but whereas Aster’s summer is foreboding and lingering with uncertainty, Leslie’s summer is just frustrating and makes you wish the solstice would come a little faster.

Leslie’s characters are whimsical, which is divisive: it will either work for you or drive you up a wall. The three characters in this book are all allegedly in their twenties, though you wouldn’t believe it by how they act. The most insufferable of the three is Heather. Once aptly described as an insane toddler, she is flying off the walls the entire novel. She is ungrounded in any serious reality, instead frolicking and yapping, asking too many questions, never aware of any danger she might be in. She wants to cause mischief and eat ice cream, not necessarily in that order. As soon as she decides that she wants ice cream early in the novel, everyone points out that they’re driving through the middle of nowhere. Heather then proceeds to mention ice cream 117 times throughout the course of the novel, bringing it up in every conversation, when she’s not talking about children’s television shows or, like, the eccentricities of her extended family. This girl does NOT stop yapping. For 450 pages, she’s just running her mouth, for better or worse, and I cannot even begin to understand her character arc or her character depth – because she’s an agent of chaos. One of the worst people to be stuck on a road trip with.

This book is essentially divided into two sections: the road trip (getting to Almanby) and a sequence of events in Almanby itself. Once the characters actually get to the village that they’ve been superstitious about for TWO HUNDRED PAGES, things do pick up, though not enough. It gets progressively creepier, though Heather is still running around trying to find ice cream. There are a lot of interesting ideas at play in the Almanby sequence, but again, because of the leisurely structuring of the novel, there’s not enough time spent really exploring these ideas. Who is Green Anne? Why does she live underground? Do these questions matter? Leslie spends time flipping back and forth between whether something is real or not; is it actually happening or is it a fabrication, a false memory that Almanby is inserting into these characters’ memories? At a certain point, it feels noncommittal to have THIS much subjectivity. I get it, I get it, it’s a dangerous town with an unsettling disposition, you need to keep some things hidden – but there was so much that happened that could’ve been a false memory, I’m actually not sure what DID happen. Is all of it a false memory? Does it matter? These are questions.

All of this said, I don’t want to discredit Leslie’s writing, which is strikingly evocative and always left me wanting more. The problem is that there’s just too much. Had Leslie actually had an editor that tried to shape this meandering story into a more refined story that could get to the core a little faster while still maintaining some element of the slow summer, this book would not only work better, but be much more broadly marketable. It’s a shame because especially when we finally get to Almanby, there’s some really good liminal space horror about House of Leaves-style house mazes and false memories, things that genuinely freak me out. But it’s outweighed by a relentlessly slow paces and characters that you want to give ice cream just so they’ll stop yapping. It hurts when a book like this comes along because it’s so clear that this could’ve been highly effective and marketable had there been more editorial notes, if the road trip could’ve been cut down and reframed by ~100 pages, if the story got to the epicentre a little faster. There’s a lot of admirable ambition on show here, but ultimately it’s a novel of excess, which in this case obscured the potential of what the novel could’ve been had it been more sure of itself in half the words.

Sorry to the author – I do not feel good about this rating.