this was such a cute, sweet, lighthearted book! i loved the descriptions of the garden coming to life as the children did - it made me wish i'd bought one of the illustrated editions. i liked the idea that nature heals the soul and body and i loved dickon's character and his deep connection to nature and animals.

i did expect the book to have more magical and fantasy elements, more similar to maybe a narnia type of thing. i did also find the story to become very repetitive and wish the focus had been kept on mary and not shifted so much to colin. there were also a lot of grammatical errors, like commas and periods in random places. it happened so much and was very distracting and annoying. i don't know if this is just the case with this edition or with all of them but i feel like the book's been out long enough where this shouldn't be an issue and it was very disappointing to see how frequent it was.

The story and narrative shows it's ages in places, but it's hasn't lost its timeless charm from when I was a child, even if it's abit more whimsical than I remember.

You’d have to pay me to listen to this audiobook again. I couldn’t stand the accents and the pitch the narrator used to voice the children. It made them that much more unlikable. Narration aside, this is not a story I would let any child of mine read. It had racist and negative views throughout. I feel like the author would have to hate children to write them in such a nastily light. In addition to multiple racist instances, it was also ableist. The physically disabled main character felt like a disappointment to his parents solely because he was disabled and only until he overcame his disability would his father approve of him. 

This was really a surprising and lovely little read. I wasn’t intending this to be my first book of 2024, but it so Magically happened, and I think I needed it. 

 

I remember owning this book when I was a child, but never got around to reading it. I think I would have loved it, but would have found the Broad Yorkshire challenging. Two decades later and I had trouble even now. 

 

But it was really a beautiful story and one full of hope, which is something I needed at the beginning of the year. I found myself wanting to go back into the story to see how the garden was progressing. 

 

Some of the language did make me uncomfortable, and I think I would need to have a long discussion with my son about the racism and colonialism featured in this novel before he sets out to read it himself. I would for sure recommend it to him when he gets older, though.