Excerpts Romantasy Read an Excerpt From The Divine Gardener’s Handbook by Eli Snow WARNING: MAY CAUSE REBELLION, RADICAL GARDENING, AND ROMANCE. By Eli Snow | Published on July 16, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Divine Gardener’s Handbook, a sapphic dystopian romantasy by Eli Snow, out from Saturday Books on August 18th. 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. Buy the Book The Divine Gardener’s Handbook Eli Snow Buy Book The Divine Gardener's Handbook Eli Snow Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget God’s gardens were beautiful in a way that a simple word could never do justice. The leaves so lustrous they could have been polished. Petals had peeked out in saturated hues that put Cyprin in mind of fresh paints. The grass—even the damned grass looked like it had been laser cut. Planed rather than trimmed. The gardens were nothing like the city, where Cyprin worked in one of twelve hundred apple orchards, where apples undulated like ocean waves whenever she closed her eyes, where only stale light made it down past the scrapers and the hot-sick smell of full trash cans and close bodies surrounded her—getting a job there was like getting plucked out of obscurity by one of those claw machines at a fair. It was an almost-impossibility. But for the first time in a lifetime of trying, Cyprin had secured an interview in the Divine Gardens. The pinnacle of horticultural research and practice happened in the Divine Gardens. And only ten thousand lucky individuals got to be a part of it. Which had sounded like a lot until Cyprin had thought about the seven billion who lived in the Divine Kingdom of Verdure, most of them with green thumbs. And until she’d remembered hardly anyone ever vacated their position in the gardens. Most went through to retirement. Some chose to keep working until they died, nodding out with the bluebells in some quiet corner. No matter how old or infirm they were by the end, the garden admin staff seemed to find ways for them to contribute. After all, the divine gardeners were like a big family. A big elite family. Okay, maybe more like a cult. A cult Cyprin desperately wanted to belong to. God’s gardens were full of purist snobs who bathed in starch and dewed instead of sweating, and for the interview, Cyprin had made herself a close approximation of them. Dark hair waxed tight to her scalp, lips precision-lined, tawny brown skin scrubbed of imperfections. She’d even donned impractical but showy all-white coveralls. But after walking in the midmorning heat to get to the garden admin center, everything was sweat-soaked. At least the garden admin center where the interview was to be held was cool and damp, hewn out of the bedrock. Grow lights strung up in lines at ankle height constituted a major OHS hazard, and seedlings littered the floor in disposable cardboard pots. If only Cyprin had known whom she was about to meet. How this was about to go. She would’ve run back to the city. And maybe avoided the black market. Maybe. Toward the back of the admin center, two women talked at a stone desk, dressed in the white outfits of palace staff. They were everything Cyprin wanted to be. One held a watering can and had soft, round features, with stunning green eyes framed by large glasses. She was short and medium-sized, with a curly bob of brownish hair and pinkish-white skin, while the other woman was tall and eggshell-white, thin, and blond. The blond had a good sassy eyebrow-raise going, as though whole parts of her face were leaning away from the conversation. Cyprin tried to butt in for her appointment. “Hey, excuse me?” The short woman shushed her before returning to her conversation, and Cyprin’s visions of perfect, floaty, enviable garden angels evaporated. She tried to butt in again. “Hey, I’m here for—” The blond’s eyes were sympathetic, but the brown-haired girl was rude. “Be quiet for a moment, will you? Wait your turn.” Cyprin’s glare should’ve withered her on the spot, but the woman just went right back to her whiny conversation. “—I wanted gold petals for the petal-mail fitting, but there weren’t enough perfect gold roses, so I’ve ended up with red and gold! That’s a problem, isn’t it? Do you think that’s a problem? I’m worried it’s going to make God look sallow!” Cyprin committed the whole of her to angry memory. The manic corkscrew curls, cheeks the pink of rat tails. Drip, drip—the watering can was as emotionally off-kilter as its owner. Droplets fell from it and completely failed to hit a plant a mere finger’s width away. Cyprin’s eye twitched faintly. It was hate at first sight. “Excuse me,” Cyprin said, very loudly and firmly. “I’m here for my interview.” The blond on the other side of the desk turned toward Cyprin with an unmistakable air of relief. The short lady with the brown curls tipped the watering can onto her own foot. Good Divine, what a dorkus! Cyprin had never seen such large eyes on a person, luminous and green, almost hypnotic. “Oh! You must be Cyprin Voltag!” said the blond, the owner of the sassy eyebrow. “I’m Amanda Anstan, and this is our head gardener, Purcell Whitlock. So nice to finally meet you in the flesh.” “Fine. I’ll leave you to it.” Purcell smiled in a brittle way. “After all, I’m supposed to go and dress God.” She looked cute but bitey, like a terrier that had suffered too many pats on the head. A-hur-hur-hur, dress God, Cyprin mocked Purcell in the safety of her imagination, suffering the end of their exchange with a polite smile plastered on her face. These two were chatting about how tight they were with God while her whole life rested on a knife’s edge. Unbelievable. Purcell jostled her on the way out, and that was when Cyprin realized she could smell her, sweet and cloying like a candy shop. Cyprin had the unhinged thought that if she cracked Purcell open like a piñata, pink musk sticks would spill out. For a moment she felt every bit the predatory city rat she was trying not to be. The possibility of there being ten thousand Purcells in the gardens reared its ugly head. Cyprin pictured them as little marshmallows she would pop in her mouth one by one until she was sick. But she had to get in. She had to finally see him From The Divine Gardener’s Handbook by Eli Snow. Copyright © 2026 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Divine Gardener’s Handbook</i> by Eli Snow appeared first on Reactor.