On the night her mother dies, 8-year-old Beatrice receives an invitation to the mysterious Winter Garden. A place of wonder and magic, filled with all manner of strange and spectacular flora and fauna, the garden is her solace every night for seven days. But when the garden disappears, and no one believes her story, Beatrice is left to wonder if it were truly real.

Eighteen years later, on the eve of her wedding to a man her late father approved of but she does not love, Beatrice makes the decision to throw off the expectations of Victorian English society and search for the garden. But when both she and her closest friend, Rosa, receive invitations to compete to create spectacular pleasure gardens – with the prize being one wish from the last of the Winter Garden’s magic – she realises she may be closer to finding it than she ever imagined.

Now all she has to do is win.

Jacket copy

**Discussion best enjoyed if you have already read the book – spoilers abound!**

Our Discussion 💬

The Winter Garden proved to be a tough one for both of us to get through. But we had already tried two books and abandoned them, so we committed to this one. Unfortunately, it’s 517 pages long – approximately 250 pages longer than it should have been. The first 200 pages or so felt wholly unnecessary. “When are we going to get to the story?”, we kept asking. We would have been happy to skip the first part which felt like uninteresting backstory filler.

Choppy Plot and Style

My number one annoyance with the story was that everything comes across as too easy. Rosa and Beatrice practically have more money than they know what to do with. When they want something, they get it or create it. Anything that requires effort occurs off page. Mom pointed out that the author “did not make good choices” when deciding what events to give page time. I had that thought several times while reading, thinking “Shouldn’t this sort of event get more page time??” But then the book would be like five million pages long. Mom described the story as choppy for the reader, leaving us wondering why the author focused on this and not that.

I also struggled with the writing style, at least for the first half. I’m not sure if it improved or if I just became used to it. To me, the dialogue felt stiff and juvenile.

Characters

Beatrice and Rosa are both extremely hurt and flawed women. They make poor choices, they quarrel with those who support them, they can come across as quite irritating. This makes it difficult to spend 500+ reading about them. As well, both are extremely rich and members of the British gentry, so that makes them even more difficult to sympathize with. Both Mom and I thought their friend James Sheppard was a saint, too good for them, and were pleased when he basically peaced out for the later part of the book. He deserved better! Mom’s thought was, “I don’t have patience for Beatrice or Rosa and you, James, shouldn’t either. You need to head out and do your own thing because those two can’t make up their minds.” 👏🏻

Glimmers of What Might Have Been

Now, that being said, I think Beatrice and Rosa could have been fascinating, moving characters in the hands of a different writer. There were several fleeting moments where I felt I got a glimpse of what could have been. For example, when Rosa and Beatrice hold a magical frog that shows each what the other truly thinks of them, and both are moved to learn how much they are admired:

‘Incredible,’ Rosa breathed. She looked pleased, and a little embarassed. ‘I hope I can be half the person you believe me to be. What an extraordinary frog.’

The Winter Garden, pg 282

Or when Beatrice revisits the moment which forms her favourite memory and she recognizes the difference between memory and reality:

She felt that frustrated sense of restlessness that came with stifling summers. As an adult, she had remembered only the idyllic parts, but the imperfections were somehow pelasant to her now too. They filled in the gaps and of the picture and made this time real once again.

The Winter Garden, pg 396

The scene with Rosa and Eustace competing to eat Beatrice’s magical plums was probably the only moment in the entire book where I thought, “Ooh, hooray, a challenging moment that’s actually happening on page!” Because the author glosses over most events that could carry any weight, it’s hard to feel for Beatrice and Rosa. The premise of creating competing magical gardens holds promise. The exploration of fractured female friendship could have been more incisively written. The critique of women’s place in patriarchal society could have been more mature and nuanced. But as the book stands, we found it to be a lot of fluff with little reward.

Fantastical Elements

It took us quite some time to realize that this story takes place in a world where some magic is accepted as normal. I think this is because we spend so much time at the start with Beatrice, whose only ‘magical’ experience is having visited the winter garden which no one believes. But eventually we came to understand that Rosa’s clockwork creatures are more magical than a feat of engineering, and that many plants in this world have magical properties.

While both Rosa and Beatrice’s gardens were beautifully conceived, we once again felt frustrated by the lack of challenge or consequence in the creations of the gardens. They just appear, boom, with almost no insight into how they are developed. We don’t read about how Rosa creates her carousel or how Beatrice creates her plum trees. Beatrice travels oversees to gain what she needs but that’s not described in the book. Rosa pours hours into craft but we never read about her doing so.

We liked the Spider Queen, even though she barely had a role until the end. Mom would have liked to have more glimpses of her throughout the story. We both wondered, what was the point of the Queen putting on the competition in the end? Did she want to pit Beatrice and Rosa against each other? How could she not foresee that as a consequence of inviting both to compete? At the end, the Queen’s like “Who cares if Rosa got the wish, the garden is for Beatrice!” So what was the point of the competition??

Final Thoughts 💭

We both gave this book ★★. We can’t think of any reader we would recommend it to… (although Goodreads reviews show some folks loved it, so maybe check it out if the premise interests in you???). As Mom summarized, we like gardens and we like magical fantasy but this story focuses on the wrong things and was therefore, for us, too long and uninteresting.

Further Reading 📰

🍂 Reviews: Asha @ The Fantasy Hive, Claire @ Bookish Reads and Me
🍂 Related: For better historical fiction (with just a touch of the fantastic), check out The Cottingley Secret or Once Upon a River, both books Mom and I have previously discussed for Family Reads.

Do you have a favourite novel about gardens, magical or mundane?