“A comic delight...Winning characters and piquant wit, with an underpinning of graciousness: a standout.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Friddle has a way with the comic yet apt image...funny, down-to-earth and steeped in a sense of place.” —The Washington Post

“Mindy Friddle has a great comic touch, and her novel is a touching, heartfelt debut.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

“The Garden Angel takes on the shifting alliances defined by family, love, and friendship with quirky grace and raucous wit. Mindy Friddle's details are shocking and flawless. I'm thankful for her reminder that our frail souls can be ultimately triumphant.” —Julianna Baggott, author of Girl Talk, The Miss America Family and The Madam

“Agoraphobes and adulterers, lovers of history and advocates for the future, the mentally ill and the putatively sane all line up to do battle in The Garden Angel, a warm-hearted, funny novel about the vagaries of small-town life and the encroachments of the big, bad world.” —Debra Spark, author of Coconuts for the Saint and The Ghost of Bridgetown and editor of Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers

“Here is a wonderful debut, a novel full of laugh-out-loud humor but also heartbreak as Friddle's women struggle to honor the past while accommodating the present. Cutter Johanson is a heroine Eudora Welty would be proud to claim and one few readers will forget. THE GARDEN ANGEL is a book I did not want to end.” —Ron Rash, author of ONE FOOT IN EDEN

“THE GARDEN ANGEL is smart, soulful, sensual and hysterically funny. Mindy Friddle's writing is as quirky and original as the South itself.” —Valerie Ann Leff, author of BETTER HOMES AND HUSBANDS