Book Review: The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston

Official Synopsis: When Sophie Drear plans her escape to coastal Maine for the summer—for a temporary job revitalizing the storied grounds at Lilymoor House—she doesn’t expect to fall in love.

But she does: With the beguiling land, the fragrant flowers, and the towering hedge maze. With the quirky staff and the enigmatic woman who owns the place.

And then, the door appears. Never in the same place twice, it leads her to a secret, and unfinished, garden with a frustrated thundercloud of a man trapped inside.

This mysterious garden is not the only sign that the future of Lilymoor is unstable: the foliage resists Sophie’s careful nurturing, vines threaten to strangle the hedges, and the manor’s owner has wild ideas about who will take over when she retires—including her inconveniently attractive nephew who is also there just for the summer.

Despite herself, Sophie has come to care for the residents of Lilymoor just as much as she cares for its grounds. With the help of one man on the outside of the secret garden, and one man on the inside, she might be the only person who can figure out exactly what Lilymoor needs to bloom once more.

Sophie Drear has always loved flowers and plants, the way they could grow even in the craziest environments and with the right care. After visiting Lilymoor years ago with her best friend, Sophie returns to the grounds as a caretaker, hoping to bring the gardens back to their full potential before the bi-centennial. Sophie has been mourning the loss of her best friend Harriet, who passed from cancer a few months before. She can't help but feel Harriet around her in the gardens but also finds herself wishing for a different ending to their story. Her survivors guilt is definitely a driving factor in how Sophie is moving through life during this story.

While working on the gardens, searching for where a mysterious water source is coming from, Sophia happens upon a random door. When she walks through the door, she finds another garden, flush with flowers that need more love than she could imagine. But she also finds Cyrus, the great nephew of the owner of Lilymoor, who is lost within the garden. When she learns that Cyrus can't leave the garden...and thinks its the day of the bi-centennial which is months away, she is confused on what the garden is trying to tell her.

Now as she works on the gardens outside of the door, where she meets the other great-nephew Oliver, Sophie is also working on helping Cyrus escape the garden he found himself in. But trying to solve the mystery of the garden behind the door means digging into the past between the two nephews, but also the owners of Lilymoor as a whole. And Lilymoor is ready to share some of it's secrets with those who deserve it.

One of the main themes of this book is moving on from grief, but shown in different ways based on the character. We get to see how each person who ends up at Lilymoor has lost something or someone, and how the gardens seem to help their healing. For the nephews, their grief is connected to the gardens and the things they have done in the past that have kept them away from both the gardens and each other. I think having these different types of grief and showing how each character works through them was a really great part of the story, especially when you have a mysterious garden pulling some of the strings.

Outside of the gardens, I found Sophie and Cyrus really well written characters, even if Cyrus is kind of a jerk for the first few times we meet him. We get to see two people who have been through a lot and think they have to escape to get away from it, who was being forced to keep coming back to the things that hurt them. I think watching them deal with their griefs and expectations for themselves was really lovely. I also really enjoyed having the setting of a house surrounded by intricate gardens, full of secrets and flowers that shouldn't make sense in their environment. The vibes of The Secret Garden was definitely a great choice for this novel.

As a person who always really enjoys that way that Ashley Poston writes magical realism, how it blends so seamlessly into what could be the real world, I really enjoyed this story. I know magical realism is not always for everyone, but I do think Poston is one of the better authors at doing it. I also like that there are small cameos from their other books as well, even if its just an offhanded mention.

I rated this book 4 out of 5 stars!

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