📖 Blog Tour ~ The Forgotten Garden by Sharon Gosling

Simon Schuster
27 April 2023

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book
and to Random Things Tours for the invitation to the blog tour

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

Successful landscape architect Luisa MacGregor has finally got the green light to go ahead with a charity project she’s been working on for years: taking parcels of land in deprived areas and building gardens that can involve the community.

Arriving in a rundown seaside town 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 charity garden project in the run down Cumbrian town of Collaton offers a much needed lifeline for more than one person in this small community. Luisa MacGregor is the landscape architect who has a vision for the garden but she can't take on this mammoth project alone and needs to rely on the goodwill of the townsfolk, some of whom are more enthusiastic than others however, with the help of local teacher Cas and troubled teenager Harper, Luisa begins to think that this dream could become a possibility.

This beautifully written story unfolds in a lovely descriptive way and pretty soon I was as much invested in the garden project as was Luisa and her helpers. The small Cumbrian town is brought vividly to life, with its areas of social deprivation and inevitable troubled thuggery, and yet it also offers a glimmer of hope as the community realise that pulling together is better than allowing events to pull them apart.

The author brings to life both the joy and challenges of being involved in a community project and infuses the story with warmth, wit, a smattering of will they, won't they romance and some hidden dangers which all combine to make The Forgotten Garden a lovely immersive read and one I enjoyed so much I raced through the book in the space of just a couple of rainy afternoons.

About the Author

Sharon started her career as an entertainment journalist, writing non-fiction books about film and television. She is also the author of multiple children’s books. Sharon and her husband live in a small village in northern Cumbria where they run a second-hand bookshop, Withnail Books in Penrith.

Twitter @sharongosling #TheForgottenGarden

Instagramsharongoslingauthor

@simonschusterUK

@RandomTTours