grief

Review: The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston

~ megs14malloy

The Someday GardenThe Someday Garden by Ashley Poston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Someday Garden follows Sophie Drear, who gets hired for the Summer to be the new Head Gardner at the captivating Lilymoor House. This enchanting property on the coast of Maine is one Sophie has been familiar with for years.

When Sophie’s job at the New York Botanical Garden starts to feel stale, and she’s offered the chance to work at Lilymoor for the Summer, she feels compelled to accept.

Lilymoor is just as lush and enchanting as she remembered, but the grounds are also in need of some TLC. It’s not just her staying at the property either, there’s a couple other staff members and the vibrant older woman who owns it.

As Sophie settles in, she feels renewed by the magical property. She can breath again, and she starts to really care about the future of Lilymoor and all who reside there.

The most fascinating aspect for Sophie is the door that appears, seemingly at random, allowing her to enter a secret garden. Within the secret garden is a handsome and mysterious man, seemingly trapped within its walls.

I don’t feel like I’m doing a great job summarizing what you’ll find within these pages, but honestly, it’s a difficult one to try and describe. What I can tell you is how magical and emotional this story is. Poston certainly knows how to squeeze your heart to within an inch of its life.

Poston is the only author who consistently makes me cry, and I love her for it. The way she examines different kinds of love, not just romantic love, feels so special to me.

This is such a gorgeous novel. I was swept away to the Coast of Maine, an area I’m very familiar with, and absolutely came to adore everything about Lilymoor House and its quirky group of residents.

The Someday Garden has many different aspects to enjoy, but for me the emotional progression Sophie experiences during her time at Lilymoor truly stands out.

Prior to her arrival, she’s suffered a terrible personal loss, and I feel like we got to see all aspects of her grief and self-discovery. The way Poston explored such a sensitive and relatable experience as grief, I cannot praise it enough. There’s such care and grace in the way she tackles these types of topics. No one does it better.

I also feel like Poston has such a unique and magical sense of Contemporary storytelling. The tone she sets and the ability to pull a Reader in, it gets me every time. On the surface, this might not seem like my kind of book, but it certainly turned out to be. This now lives in my heart rent free.

I would definitely recommend this to Contemporary Romance Readers, particularly those who enjoy Magical Realism within their stories, or anyone who has enjoyed Ashley Poston’s work in the past. This is right up there with The Dead Romantics and The Seven Year Slip for me.

Thank you so much to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me with copy to read and review. I cannot wait to see what Poston comes up with next. Her creativity knows no bounds!

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Review: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

~ megs14malloy

The Valley of Vengeful GhostsThe Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

**3.5-stars rounded up**

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts is a Contemporary Literary Fiction novel with light Grief Horror elements. We’re following Eleanor, who is feeling lost and unmoored after the death of her mother.

For years, her Mom assisted her with every aspect of her adult life. Tasks like laundry, meals and finances, were much easier to manage with her mother’s constant oversight.

Now left to survive on her own for the first time, Eleanor is struggling. She’s barely holding onto her job as an online therapist and has no real friends, or support system. In spite of that though, she’s determined to buy her own home.

It was her mom’s last directive to her, and she does have a small inheritance with which to make a down payment. The housing market is tough though, and Eleanor has no experience or knowledge in that area.

She ends up impulsively buying a model home in a valley, where the development was never completed, yet the Realtor assures her more homes, and thus people, will come. For now, Eleanor seems okay with the solitude. She’s just happy to have a place of her own.

Then the rains begin. The weather, matching her mood, is a prominent figure in this story. It exposes the issues with Eleanor’s new home, and opens up a whole range of new problems for her to try to navigate on her own.

She also learns of the shadowy history of the developer, and that knowledge is never far from her mind. As Eleanor succumbs deeper to that which haunts her, the line between what’s real and what’s not begins to blur.

Out of money and options, Eleanor needs to get hold of her emotions, and push herself through the grief process, or risk losing herself to her ghosts forever.

Saying I enjoyed this feels strange, because for me, there’s nothing particularly uplifting or enjoyable about Eleanor’s story. It gets bleak, y’all. I can’t lie about that.

However, as a Literary Fiction examination of grief, I feel like this beautifully captured the experience of a person trapped in that grief cycle, and unable to free themselves from it. Eleanor, though not overly likable, is extremely relatable I feel, in a lot of ways.

I liked her narrative voice and felt like it fit really well with the overall message Fu was trying to get across. I also felt like the audiobook narration of Eunice Wong was the perfect voice for Eleanor.

Additionally, I did like how the things haunting Eleanor were presented, and the use of the weather to set the tone of the story. I could picture it all perfectly and I did begin to really feel for Eleanor and her predicament.

The ending as well, I felt was well-constructed by Fu. You aren’t necessarily going to get a happily ever after with this kind of story, are you? That wouldn’t make sense. Life doesn’t always tie issues up with a pretty ribbon, but what you do get here I think is perhaps a little hope.

This novel is not going to be for everyone, and I get that. I do. I think if you’re the kind of Reader though, who doesn’t mind going somewhere dark emotionally and poking around in there, this could work for you.

Thank you to the publisher, Tin House, for providing me a copy to read and review. While this didn’t lift my spirits, it did capture my attention and held it. That’s quite a feat these days.

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