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.

Review - Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley

Greensmith
Aliya Whiteley
Unsung Stories, 12 October 2020
Available as: PB, 342pp, e
Source: advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781912658077

Greensmith is a richly imagined, empathetic SFF adventure on the grandest of scales - which also casts a slightly jaundiced eye on one of the most celebrated franchises in the genre.

Penelope Greensmith is working on a project - to catalogue and preserve the entirety of the world's flowers. She's assisted in this by an ingenious device her father (who began the work) left to her. Called the Vice, it has take a flower and compress its essence, its information, into a disc from which images and the plant itself can be recovered. Gradually, the storage racks in Penelope's cellar fill. She is ruthless in her task - even breaking into greenhouses at night to "acquire" specimens - but accepts her work won't be complete in her lifetime.

The background to Penelope's life is vague - there has been a War, in which people have 'fallen prey to an insidious, crawling mass delusion that had been carried by flags and leaflets and radio waves to their doors. Or perhaps they were just bored...' The only impact of the War seems to be that certain events have been erased from collective memory, but even that is uncertain. It would have been nice to know more about this - but the story moves rapidly on, to the day when Penelope's life is turned upside down by a fast talking time-and-space-travelling stranger who persuades her that, RIGHT NOW, to save the universe, she must join him in an improbable quest, must leave behind all she knows - her adult daughter, her cottage - and embark on a quixotic, madcap adventure.

Together they form a team. 'The legendary and mysterious space traveller... And his assistant.' Yes, The Horticulturalist (Hort for short) is famed throughout the universe. Yes, he has access to an apparently infinite storage space/ home, filled with wonders. Yes, lots of running is involved. I think you know exactly what long running SF TV series that echoes (don't you?) It's not though the only allusion here: Whiteley has a but of fun I think - she also refers to 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away' and drops other references too ('I am the one wearing the red shirt. I am expendable'). 

Penelope responds as you'd expect - as assistants are always written, eager to experience wonders, but also desperate to do whatever she can to save her daughter Lily, and the Universe, from a mysterious, plant-destroying virus. She plunges into danger, as Hort aids oppressed creatures and then confronts his greatest enemy. This middle part of the book is a real triumph of writing and the imagination: grappling with the fact that Penelope's, somehow, there and not there - Hort's method of travel isn't exactly physical - and with the way in which reality is so strange that she only experiences a translation of it, the nearest thing she can grasp but not the truth. It's actually rather disconcerting. No snippets I could quote here can really do it justice. The effect on me was rather like that final section of the film 2001, with strangeness upon strangeness and all familiar landmarks missing.

If you feel that's all just too rich for you, too jarring, please don't give up. This book contains its own quiet rewards - from the sheer glory of Whiteley's writing to that rather sceptical, questing examination of the time traveller himself. What can you really say about such a being? What degree of ego and self assurance does it take to shift worlds and play with the course of events as he does? ('...a selfish, spoiled, unaware and unrepentant idiot... [who] could be classified as Very Dangerous Indeed...') 

Above all, what, exactly, is his relationship in the end with Penelope? 

It's hard to be clearer than that without spoilers - which, I assure you, you don't want for this particular book. 

Enjoyable from the first page to the last, this book is enthralling, baffling, weird, deep, quirky and in the end - I thought - very, very sad.

In short, I'd recommend.

For more information about Greensmith, and to buy a copy, see the publisher's website here.