Review - The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston

The Someday Garden

Ashley Poston
HarperCollins HQ, 16 June 2026
Available as: PB, 378pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9780008769284

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Someday Garden  to consider for review.

The latest of Ashley Poston's romances-with-a-supernatural-twist takes us to Maine, where Sophie Drear is on loan away from the New York Botanical Gardens to give some TLC to Lilymoor. Lilymore is a renowned garden on the coast, which has become rather neglected since the death of the owner's (Eula's) husband Henry. Projects were left unfinished, parts of the gardens have been closed off - and now Eula is talking about stepping back and passing the place on to her nephews.

Sophie has been feeling frustrated, stuck,  and alone and working at Lilymoor gives her a chance to consider her future direction. The gardens' two hundredth anniversary is approaching, and the place needs some love - as does Sophie. She sets to work to clear the mysterious vines that are choking the hedge maze, the damp which is destroying the wildflowers, and the general decay of it all.

Lilymoor, however, proves to be a strange place, whether it's Damnit, the murderous goose who prowls the grounds, the legend that you can hear the voice of your truest love in the grounds, or the way that the garden resists being quite, well, tamed...

For Sophie, it's the place where she keeps finding a strange blue door that later just, well, isn't there. 

And it's the grumpy man who's in the half-finished garden behind that door.

Dripping with romance, longing and loss, The Someday Garden is the story of Sophie's summer, a summer in which she reflects on her future, her life, her friendship with Harriet ("Harrie") who writes lists of untranslatable words (Poston gives one to each chapter as a heading). 

Poston's books are loosely linked - I saw references here to the family undertakers of The Dead Romantics, the publishing world of The Seven Year Slip (did we meet Juliette there?) and the seaside music happy of Sounds Like Love. But they are not sequels, and I think it's more important that they are linked thematically. Each takes a "what if?" and makes it really - whether the idea of a time slip to allow an opportunity to meet a potential lover, a little town where dreams can come true, or hearing a loved one's voice in one's head. Poston takes these ideas seriously, showing up the potentialities but also the dangers. In The Someday Garden, the idea truly embodies the themes of the novel: being stuck, unable to move on, literally trapped. Sophie is in such a state, but so, in reality, is the garden. She hasn't come to Lilymoor to find love, indeed she's resisting that idea, she sees it as a betrayal, but it may be that finding it will free not only herself, but the garden.

The Someday Garden is a beautiful book, both in its themes and in Poston's down to earth, rooted, yet allusive prose. Horticultural language abounds - "I could barely take root anywhere",  lovers see the world around them "changing and growing and become, again and again, as we shucked off our leaves and burrowed our roots".  About Lilymoor: "There was a surety in the sound of this place. The promise of a sprout, the slowness of a bud unfurling." Rootedness is important, but so is growth. And growth may require painful changes - rooting out those vines, drying that bed, weeding and seeding and waiting.

It's a book that accepts pain and loss, and knows that they will never simply be healed - but at the same times, also knows that to hold onto them stunts growth.  As I said, a beautiful, moving book and one I strongly recommend.

For more information about The Someday Garden, see the publisher's website here.