IN A GARDEN BURNING GOLD read-along and recap, pt 1
chapters 1 through 10, plus fun facts and behind the scenes tidbits
the first rule of recap read-along is there are no rules but there ARE spoilers obviously
each week i’ll post a (very informal but still informative) summary of what happened in the relevant chapters along with some thoughts and behind the scenes notes about like inspiration and plans and fun facts etc! if you have questions or theories or suggestions for songs to add to my playlist or whatever! really anything! you can comment them on the post and we can have a chat
also don’t forget to read the footnotes! i put fun stuff in there
okay!!!!!! let’s get INTO IT
RECAP
Chapters One and Two
hello welcome to the book let’s meet the characters and explore our first major setting (i promise the recap bits won’t always be this long there’s just a lot of intro work to do for this first section)
The Argyros Family
Parents: Vasilis Argyros (alive), Irini Argyros (dead sorry)
Children: Rhea and Lexos (twins and alive the kids are all alive), Nitsos, and Chrysanthi
the Argyros family rules Thyzakos, a small nation that’s part of a larger federation. Vasilis—referred to as Baba by the kids—is the head dude which means he's the Thyzak Stratagiozi1 (there's one per country... he's not a king but like. eh close enough) and is responsible for doling out fancy magical powers and responsibilities to his kids
Rhea: the seasons
called Thyspira by your average person
starts each new season by marrying a new consort, closes out that season/moves the cycle onto the next by murdering that same consort, starts it all over again
so basically rhea marries and then murders 4 people every year, she is what the bachelorette show SHOULD be (abc take notes)
her consorts are chosen from a selection provided by the various regions around the world/in Thyzakos—whoever she picks and kills earns preferential treatment for their home area for the season—but BIG SHOCKER it seems like fewer people are interested in volunteering to die lately???? weird
Lexos: the stars and the tides
every night lexos takes a needle and thread and stitches constellations into a big piece of fabric and ta da those constellations appear in the sky
he also has like. a big bowl of water. and when he stirs it the ocean stirs too. look i describe it better in the book
also as the oldest kid, he’s his dad’s second and theoretical heir (as if Baba ever plans to die)—he’s the kid Baba takes to the office on Take Your Kid To Work Day
Nitsos: animals/creatures2
you know those like little robot dogs you could get as a toy when you were a kid that took AA batteries and made a little “arf” sound and like did a flip yeah nitsos builds those basically
if you build a new creature on the grounds of the Argyros house, actually alive like flesh and blood versions of those creatures will exist in the outside world
but nitsos got the short end of the stick (Baba thinks he is…… useless) bc the people who had his magic gift before him pretty much took care of all the building and creating new creatures so all he’s supposed to do is perform maintenance and stay out of the way
Chrysanthi: light and color
chrysanthi wanders around with special paints and a paintbrush and adds shadow/highlight/color to everything she sees, and just like with her siblings’ gifts, what she does on the grounds of the house takes effect in the larger world
and SPEAKING of those grounds of the house
welcome to Stratathoma! picture a bigass stone building on the edge of a cliff actually you know what
just picture this bc this is how i’ve always imagined it
this is where the Thyzak Stratagiozi has lived since well before Baba and where the Argyros kids (Argyrosi, sometimes, in text) spend most of their time… except Rhea who goes on field trips for like 2/3 months at a time and comes home for a quick respite before heading back out again
and THAT brings us to the actual PLOT OF THIS BOOK lmao — Rhea is HOME! she is newly back from her autumn trip abroad and it did not go quite as smoothly as it should, so when she arrives back at Stratathoma to find Lexos and Chrysanthi waiting for her, she’s eager to just relax and spend some time with her family
so of course Baba shows up, scolds her for fucking around (rhea: actually it’s more that i felt weird about murdering a dude in cold blood and i wondered if other people could possibly be People and not just tools but never mind you’re right sorry my bad), and makes her promise to do better next time
take a guess do you think she will do better next time
no
anyway
Chapter Three
dinner time! i’m a complete sucker for a Tense Family Dinner moment—everybody in the same room, stuck looking at each other and pretending to be polite when what they really want to do is argue
but this dinner doesn’t implode and instead of an argument the big finish is the kids watching Baba using the power he holds as the Thyzak Stratagiozi—power over death (oooh)
by speaking a specific prayer Baba can kill anybody on the continent3 and is in fact responsible for doing this every day. Baba isn’t the only death dealer (??? weird) at play—you can still die all the regular ways, don’t worry!—but it’s like if you replaced “died of natural causes” with “died bc their name came up on this one dude’s list sorry man what can you do”
Chapter Four
after dinner (and after dismissing Nitsos who knows he is the least favorite and who is quietly pissed about that) Baba and Lexos convene for a strategy session bc things are not looking good for them lately
Baba’s influence is waning and the Stewards, powerful families in charge of smaller sub-sections of Thyzakos4, are maybe about to depose him? Baba’s hoping Rhea can pick a consort from one of these families and bring them back in line but Lexos is like
“hey uh. you know the Sxoriza? that rebel group up in that remote area in the northeast of the country? the people who want to secede from Thyzakos? the people who fucking hate your guts? maybe we should worry about them”
Baba: nah i’m chill thanks tho
Chapter Five
lexos, however, is NOT chill, especially after he finds out via his nitsos-built mechanical spy bird that Michali, the son of the northeastern Steward, has been seen with the Sxoriza
threat level midnight!!!! he has to do something! and that something is convince Rhea to marry Michali who just so happens to be one of her upcoming suitors5 for her winter choosing (i’m sure Michali has no reasons of his own to be there not at all)
that way Rhea can spy on the Sxoriza and the Steward family in the area AND kill Michali at winter’s close, kneecapping any rebellion movement in the area
Chapter Six
rhea’s not on board.
Chapter Seven
the choosing approaches!!!! rather than spend time trying to decide between Michali (Lexos’s candidate) or Kallistos (Baba’s candidate) Rhea flees to the grounds of Stratathoma and runs into Nitsos who shows her…
THE TITULAR GARDEN6
it’s full of clockwork plants and flowers and trees and bugs and hummingbirds it’s even clockwork-snowing and rhea’s like “my dude when did you have time to build all this” and nitsos is like “i have no friends and i’ve never left my house you figure it out”7
Chapter Eight
the suitors arrive!!! rhea watches them all arrive from her creepy spy spot over the door and is like “oh boy. slim pickings y’all”
later at the big Meeting All The Suitors Before Rhea Chooses One Of Them Tomorrow party (where rhea is dressed VERY fancy8 this is not important to the book it’s just important to me) she meets both kallistos, who is baba’s pick and is very very far up his own ass, and michali, who is lexos’s pick and is deeply awkward/not a party person
but all in all the party is not a disaster UNTIL
Chapter Nine
baba gets drunk and fucks it all up! it’s like a longstanding cultural tradition that when rhea is in public/around people outside her family she’s supposed to use her title, Thyspira, and not her actual name9
but baba, being hammered, calls her rhea by accident and everybody’s like Uh Oh! what a disaster! this is a farce! kallistos even threatens to ditch the choosing altogether
rhea absolutely cannot let that happen so she’s like “no no no kallistos my buddy my guy it’s all good i’ll pick you and maybe…. MAYBE… i won’t kill you! wouldn’t that be fun ooh”
doing that would be a huge problem but a problem for Future Rhea! and it gets kallistos to stay! so oh well!
Chapter Ten10
buuuuut
when the time comes for rhea to actually make her choice… she finds herself picking michali the way lexos wanted her to
baba is PISSED OFF! kallistos is pissed off! lexos? he’s into it
and rhea is just ????? not really sure how the fuck that happened! she plays it off to baba like “i couldn’t help it i’m just soooo in love with michali” so that baba doesn’t suspect it’s actually to run the spying thing from lexos’s playbook (acting without baba’s approval, even with the family’s best interests at heart, is tantamount to betrayal as far as he’s concerned)
baba doesn’t really buy it but he’s like whatever. go be cold in the northeast with that weirdo. maybe having a horrible time will teach you a lesson
okay that’s the end of the recap sections today and OH FUCK i forgot i don’t think i said! everybody in the argyros family is like 100+ years old!!!!! you knew that if you read the book but probably good to say again here sorry yeah all the stratagiozis are like fuckin ancient but they don’t look ancient they’re not immortal they just age veeeery slowly (another wheel of time-ism re: the aes sedai in a way!) but you can still kill them if you want
(people do want)
additional thoughts
for this first chunk of chapters and in honor of the first episode of succession s4 airing tonight (tonight as i write this, anyway) i’ll chat a little about where the book’s idea came from and like what i Wanted To Explore lmao
wheel of time! this is a big honkin classic fantasy series and i think it’s all i read between 6th and 7th grade like i was OBSESSED you could not tear these out of my hands and basically some part of me has always always wanted to write my own. granted am i writing 14 books in this series? no. but especially relative to my YA books these are sprawling okay!!!! i wanted to do something with a big cast with contrasting settings with history and expanse and scope.
this one photo by ilya shpagin! i thought it was a painting when i first saw it but it isn’t! the photo is of a russian orthodox worshipper, and while russian and greek orthodoxy are not identical, they have a lot in common, so this photo felt familiar to me. a lot of things in garden take inspiration from elements of orthodox tradition—saints/namedays, icons, the color palette (that’s where rhea’s reference to “blood colors” comes from), etc. personally speaking my experience with religion has always been more cultural than practicing and i almost wanted to lean into that and create a disconnect in the world of garden, where a lot of the systems and aesthetics they surround themselves with were originally designed for religious use but have been transformed/repurposed, so like… what is worship anymore to them? what is faith? Big Questions, etc etc. the photo also served as direct inspiration for a moment rhea has later in the book but we’ll talk about that another time
FASHION! there’s a whole slew of collections from 2012-2015ish that took inspo from the byzantine era and pinterest loves them (as do i). i start a lot of my brainstorming by collecting images on pinterest and i found these collections really inspiring as a way to translate my general like “a byzantine-ish book would be cool” feeling to “there could also be PEOPLE in the book”
greece and more specifically an area in the northwest of greece called zagori which is where much of my greek family is from and where i spent time most summers as a kid. it looks very distinct from what most people think of when they think of greece (no marble statues, no ocean) and has a history that doesn’t always quiiiiite line up with the rest of the country mostly bc it’s so fucking hard to get there. the look and feel of that area is present in garden mostly when rhea goes to michali’s home territory, so we’ll get more into it next time, but in general most of the places in Thyzakos in the book have a vibe that skews more toward this greece than like mykonos greece
the big mac daddy (is that the expression) succession! truly it was serendipity like i started garden in fall 2017 and got my characters together like okay here’s a father who runs his family and his country with… an iron fist, to put it politely, and here are his four kids, and now let me see how these different people respond to identical circumstances and how it affects someone to be a raised under the abuse of a narcissist and how willing they are to either perpetuate that abuse cycle or break it/reject the power structure that’s benefited them in order to help those it has hurt…. and then like an absolute MIRACLE s1 of succession started airing the following summer. watching it really was like “oh shit did somebody make a tv show just for me? did somebody take all the stuff i’m interested in and put it on screen and do a really fucking good job with it just for ME???” like there they are there’s all the relationship and power and family dynamics and obv they’re different stories and different vibes and i probably couldn’t get away with titling a chapter “Shitshow at the Fuck Factory” and any comparison i’m making between garden and the show should be prefaced with about a gazillion qualifiers bc i genuinely think succession is one of the best television shows to ever be produced and much as i love my own work i don’t think i’m really gonna survive getting in the ring with like. fuckin nk jemisin or something but YOU GET IT OKAY YOU GET IT!!!!
next time: chapters 11-20, april 14
see you back here, and in the comments before then! let’s get readingggg
many of the invented words in this book derive from Greek translations and the title Stratagiozi combines the Greek word for “general” with the name Karagiozis, a character in Greek shadowpuppet shows. i wanted Stratagiozi to have a kind of diminutive vibe/an element to it that undercuts the power Baba and others in his position believe they have like great sure you’re a general you’re a strategist and also you’re this little puppet dude
nitsos’s gift was i think? the first one i came up with? either his or lexos’s whole sewing thing but either way i drew a lot of the initial inspo for the book and nitsos’s craft from a Yeats poem, “Byzantium” (yeats also has “sailing to byzantium” which overlaps)
i couldn’t say “planet” i’m sorry i just couldn’t because if you say planet you’re saying there’s a sun and space like i know i said there were stars but if i say planet! suddenly you have orbits and OTHER planets and how do the characters KNOW the word planet? where did it come from for them? i can’t do that i can’t it just breaks my brain in a very specific way
kind of a city states of ancient Greece vibe, if all the city states also answered to one dude
i wouldn’t say there’s like toooooo too much Greek mythology stuff going on in a concrete way but for sure there are elements/traces of both the hades and persephone story and the penelope and her suitors story in this book
this image of the garden—a big copper cherry tree in bloom, glass flowers and grass underneath it—is one of the first things i came up with for the book and it was really my touchpoint for how i wanted the whole arc of GARDEN + ORCHARD to go (although that sounds like i knew a lot before i started writing and i def didn’t i’m much more of a figure out as i go and then rework according to what i’ve learned person)
he just wants to go on a field trip. somebody help him
her hairstyle—the like gem on her forehead hanging from a chain threaded through her hair—is a little reference to wheel of time which i was obsessed with as a kid. moiraine was always described as wearing something like that and i thought it just sounded sooooo cool
the idea being that bc Thyspira is responsible for the deaths of 4 relatively important people a year it’s better to turn the position into this like mythologized almost storybook non-real-human thing that “regular” people can’t argue with or get mad at. like forget it Jake it’s chinatown except Thyspira is chinatown and also i don’t think i ever saw that movie so maybe chinatown doesn’t function in that line the way i’m imagining it does
there’s a tiny little scene at the top of this chapter between lexos and chrysanthi and those little sibling moments were my favorite to write, across the whole series. just little bits of punctuation where their familiarity with each other shines through and you get a sense of how they’ve operated as a unit of siblings over the last century when things aren’t quite so close to falling apart. also any scene with chrysanthi is my favorite so
I love this!! I'm finally getting around to reading this book and this recap makes it so fun to get the recap and behind the scenes info!! I can't wait to keep going!
The way that this is the perfect mix of informative, interesting, hilarious and SO FUCKING CHAOTIC!!! I'm so glad I'm doing the reread so all of the stuff you just recapped is fresh in my brain. And knowing there are nods to WoT!! Yes!!! We love to see it.