#BlogTour: The Forgotten Garden by Sharon Gosling @sharongosling @simonschusterUK @RandomTTours #TheForgottenGarden #SharonGosling #RandomThingsTours

Book Synopsis:

A novel of second chances and blossoming communities from the author of The Lighthouse Bookshop. 

Budding landscape architect Luisa MacGregor is stuck in a rut – she hates her boss, she lives with her sister, and she is still mourning the loss of her husband many years ago. So when she is given the opportunity to take on a parcel of land in a deprived area, she sees the chance to build a garden that can make the area bloom.
 
Arriving in the rundown seaside town of Collaton on the north-west coast of Cumbria, she realises that her work is going to be cut out for her. But, along with Cas, a local PE teacher, and Harper, a teen whose life has taken a wrong turn, she is determined to get the garden up and running.
 
So when the community comes together and the garden starts to grow, she feels her luck might have changed. Can she grow good things on this rocky ground? And might love blossom along the way…?

My Review:

The Forgotten Garden is an uplifting read about community, love and second chances.

Firstly I loved the idea of the community garden and I wish there was something similar near by as I’d happily volunteer there. It was lovely following the process of the garden and see if transform from a derelict piece of land to the beautiful garden it becomes. The author does a great job describing it so I felt I could imagine it perfectly in my mind and sometimes felt that I was actually there, walking in the garden with the volunteers.

The characters are all wonderful creations that I loved following throughout the book. They all touched my heart as I read and I enjoyed getting to know more about them. It was lovely to see how the community garden managed to help them all and bring them together into a close knit group. My favourite character was Harper who I really felt for and admired her trying to keep everything together at home. Her little brother Max was another favourite and I often wished I could reach into the book and give him a huge hug.

I thought this book had a lovely pace to it and I felt quickly absorbed into the wonderful community the garden creates. It was wonderful to see how the garden helped the characters and see the characters develop as the story continues. There’s a bit of surprise drama but overall I felt this was just a lovely, heartwarming read that I’ve continued to think about long after reading.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour and to the publisher for my copy of this book.

About The Author:

I’ve been writing since I was a teenager, which is now a distressingly long time ago! I started out as an entertainment journalist – actually, my earliest published work was as a reviewer of science fiction and fantasy books. I went on to become a staff writer and then an editor for print magazines, before beginning to write non-fiction making-of books tied in to film and television, such as The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful and Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film.

I now write both children’s and adult fiction – my first novel was called The Diamond Thief, a Victorian-set steampunk adventure book for the middle grade age group. That won the Redbridge Children’s prize in 2014, and I went on to write two more books in the series before moving on to other adventure books including The Golden Butterfly, which was nominated for the Carnegie Award in 2017, The House of Hidden Wonders, and a YA horror called FIR, which was shortlisted for the Lancashire Book of the Year Award in 2018.

My debut adult novel will be published by Simon & Schuster in August 2021. It’s called The House Beneath the Cliffs and it’s a story set in a very small coastal village in Scotland. The idea for it had lodged in my head years before. I have a love for unusual dwelling places and I came across a tiny house that completely captured my imagination. My adult fiction tends to centre on small communities – feel-good tales about how we find where we belong in life and what it means when we do. Although I have also published full-on adult horror stories, which are less about community and more about terror and mayhem…

I was born in Kent but now live in a very small house in an equally small village in northern Cumbria with my husband, who owns a bookshop in the nearby market town of Penrith.