I have numerous other reads I finished before this one, but I just completed the audiobook and have a lot of thoughts I’m desperate to get out, so I’m skipping ahead a bit.

Synopsis

Harriet has always been considered odd. Reviled by her father, mistrusted by the local townsfolk, Harriet has only her wild and beautiful garden and her Cousin Eunice, her dearest and only friend. When her father mysteriously disappears and Eunice moves across the country to help care for her husband’s ailing aunt, Harriet finds herself alone at the crumbling London estate she calls home. Facing the impropriety of being a young woman living alone and the prying eyes and ears of a local inspector looking for information about her missing father, Harriet finds herself searching for clues to his whereabouts despite his lifetime of cruelty toward her. When an unexpected suitor comes calling, Harriet finds she has no choice but to accept the safety and security a marriage could afford her against the outside forces at play. As Harriet finds herself embroiled in yet another abusive relationship, she faces the threat of the unveiling of her secret. Her garden is not just beautiful and wild. It lives, feels, and is willing to protect Harriet at all costs.

Review

I have just a few petty annoyances I’d like to get out of the way, because there’s also a lot to love about this story. I’ve seen some reviews that I feel unfairly focus on only the cons. I do feel like the narration could have been more concise. Sometimes the novel was needlessly repetitive. Additionally, while I understand why we must see Harriet as naive and ignorant of the workings of the world, I sometimes thought she was a little too slow to figure things out. I found the plot predictable, and I was often very frustrated with Harriet whenever she had an illuminating A-HA moment about two chapters after I’d had the very same moment. Don’t get me wrong. I loved to see how Harriet grew and embraced her own power as the novel progressed, but I do feel like it took too long to develop and then seemed like it happened all at once.

The final 1/4 of this novel was the strongest as we got to see Harriet embrace herself, her quirks, and regain her sense of confidence. As she realized her entire life had been filled with gaslighting men hell-bent on making her feel inadequate and insecure, she blossomed. The touch of magical realism that was her garden took on this new meaning, a metaphor for the inner beauty of a woman that abusive men try to prune and tame. The garden is a powerful character in the novel, and it broke my heart when Harriet was forced to take shears to its wildness, all the while feeling its pain and hurt at being betrayed by the one it was supposed to be able to trust. That’s an incredibly adept metaphor for what an abusive partner or parent inflicts, etching away at the self confidence of the one they are supposed to love. It makes them smaller and weaker by design, which is the intended result so the inflictor can feel more powerful. It’s a lovely and empowering message that we all have a thriving wildness of spirit within us that, if fostered, will bloom and grow beautifully, a spirit that’s much more powerful than a malevolent one.

I like that Iverson balanced the scales a bit by having a few male characters with integrity. Otherwise, this would have been an extremely bleak portrait of masculinity. I mean, it’s more than a century later and that detestable breed of man still exists. But the good ones are out there too, and we can’t forget that. Sadly, it’s a reality of the time that women often needed a “savior” to come along and grant them respectability and comfort. More often than not, that man who came along was no more than a different kind of persecutor. I consider myself lucky in that I could create a future of my own made of my own choices. Finding a man in today’s day and age is no longer a necessity.

Overall, this is a lovely book with strong characters and great use of symbolism. The narration is incredibly well done, so i recommend it in audio form. This would also be a great choice for book clubs, as it provides a lot of fodder for discussion.

Published December 3, 2024 by Recorded Books. ASIN B0D853XW55. Runtime 10 hrs, 26 mins. Narrated by Anna Burnett.