Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,   ISBN:9780679751526

Customer Rating: 

I am only 1/2 thru this book and I am kicking myself for not buying it sooner. I love True Crime books and this book kept popping up on my "suggested" list. I never did buy it, until this weekend. Wow wow wow! Not only is this interesting in a cultural way, it is also one of the best written books I have EVER read. The writer draws you in from the first page and every page afterwards you get more and more intrigued. The descriptions are so vivid, the characters are so memorable, the setting is so lush.... I must stop now so I can go back to reading.
Get this book!!! My whole family is planning to read it as soon as I finish, then we are booking a trip to Savannah!

Customer Rating: 

John Berendt 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' is a nonfiction novel, a subgenre popularized by Capote's 'In Cold Blood'. A nonfiction novel is basically a work of fiction based on real, although highly fictionalized, events.

As for the novel itself, my feelings are somewhat mixed: on one hand, I must admit that I easily fell for the whole 'Old South' setting, with its full cast of eccentric and deeply intriguing characters.
On the other hand, I sort of resented the nonfiction part of it. Indeed, much of the first half of the novel is made up of disconnected vignettes depicting different inhabitants of Savannah (which is where the story takes place).
This portion of the novel is where the journalist in Berendt takes over. Here, he basically chronicles meetings with various people (all of them, as it would perhaps be acceptable in a travel account, remain starkly bidimensional), and the writing feels overall like a contrived effort to add a bit of colour to the description of a city he happens to be visiting.

Things get more interesting when he focuses on the actual plotline, which revolves around the alleged murder of a young hustler, perpetrated by a well-respected Antique dealer. This is where the novel actually becomes a work of fiction and the book turns into a page-turner.

...and a pretty good one at that :-)

Customer Rating: 

This book is disappointing. There is really nothing interesting about this book to me. I am from Georgia (born and raised) and I live about 4 hours from Savannah and have visited about 5 or 6 times and love it, but this book I do not love. It is very dark, depressing and just boring in my opinion. I don't know where all the hype came from, but this book did not do it for me! I struggled just to finish it.

Customer Rating: 

I selected this book for my bookclub because I had recently seen and enjoyed the movie. I'm happy to say that the book is a million times better than the movie!
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is carried by the strength of its awesome characters and they are unforgettable. Savannah, the setting, is, in its own way, as much of a character as any of the people mentioned in the book. All in all, the novel is gorgeous and unforgettable. I loved it!

Customer Rating: 

I bought this as a gift for my dear friend in Michigan. She would buy the book in paperbook, read it, then give it to a friend that wanted to read it. She did this several times so I wanted to give her one in hardback that would be harder to part with. I asked the sender to put a message in the package, they were wonderful and did that for me. My friend loves the book, thank you.