Rating: 
Summary: A Most Unusual Love Story
Review: The setting for this book is wartime Britain - not the blitz on London but a country estate in the Devon countryside, where a group of Canadian soldiers happen to be posted temporarily near a group of English girls who are learning to grow crops for the war effort. Everything about this book is unusual - its context, characters and incredibly sensitive development of the story. There are turns of phrase that will catch you completely off guard. It is funny, sad and delightful. It's as well that it's not a lengthy book, because, once you start it, you won't be able to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: Strangely wonderful
Review: This is a nice quick read, but it isn't pointless. The book opened my eyes to a lot of things that, even though the book takes place in the 1940s, still pretain to now. The end was sad, but it left me content in a akward way. I would say that if you have the time read the book because it is very well written, with a good story to back it.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful language, but leaves you wanting
Review: This is a quick read and is full of beautiful language and imagery. The characters are interesting and the discovery of the garden keeps the reader engaged. The intersection of real books is an interesting technique, gardeners and readers of Woolf won't be disappointed. The end comes rather suddenly, and leaves you wanting more. The garden's function in the end and the narrator's relationship to it is rather disappointing
Rating: 
Summary: Fragrant prose
Review: This is much better book than the Amazon reviewer gives it credit for. Perhaps, because this is such a personal novel (with respect to the experiences of the main character) and one that those who survived the Battle of Britain might connect with deeply, there are aspects of it that are lost on some readers and reviewers. My parents were such Battle of Britain survivors, having lived in London during the bombing. And my father was an avid gardener. And, my mother had a fling with an American GI (as opposed to Canadian in this book). That's the personal aspect that resonates with me, and I am deeply thankful to Helen Humphreys for capturing all the pain, love, longing, and faith that these real people experienced. But enough of that... this book is a small prose miracle. Others here have stated and summarized the main plot, so I won't repeat it. The idea of gardening, of nurturing both the earth and one's soul is not a particularly novel (pardon the pun) idea. What IS different here is the magnificent way in with Humphreys tells this story in the first person (not as easy at is seems) with such passion, poetry, and compassion. Humphreys' way with words, with describing the gardens, the pain of loss, the longing of love unrequited, the miracle of growth, is stunning. "Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backward glance." These words by our heroine, Gwen, are as bittersweet as the novel, as bittersweet as her love affair with roses, as bittersweet as her unspoken attraction to Capt. Raley, one of the Canadian soldiers billeted nearby. As she says early in the book, in one of these backward glances, "I sit in this rocking train carriage, years later, words floating around me, wisping down in thin, grey threads. Nothing I can hold in my hands. Smoke, these words are smoke." Gwen recalls overhearing Jane, another of the young woman employed to grow food for the war, read aloud from Wolff's "To the Lighthouse" to one of the Canadian soldiers. As Gwen puts it, "and when I hear that voice [Jane's] polishing those words so that they shine inside me..." Well, all I can say is that Helen Humphreys' words also truly shine.
Rating:
Summary: Fragrant prose
Review: This is much better book than the Amazon reviewer gives it credit for. Perhaps, because this is such a personal novel (with respect to the experiences of the main character) and one that those who survived the Battle of Britain might connect with deeply, there are aspects of it that are lost on some readers and reviewers. My parents were such Battle of Britain survivors, having lived in London during the bombing. And my father was an avid gardener. And, my mother had a fling with an American GI (as opposed to Canadian in this book). That's the personal aspect that resonates with me, and I am deeply thankful to Helen Humphreys for capturing all the pain, love, longing, and faith that these real people experienced. But enough of that... this book is a small prose miracle. Others here have stated and summarized the main plot, so I won't repeat it. The idea of gardening, of nurturing both the earth and one's soul is not a particularly novel (pardon the pun) idea. What IS different here is the magnificent way in with Humphreys tells this story in the first person (not as easy at is seems) with such passion, poetry, and compassion. Humphreys' way with words, with describing the gardens, the pain of loss, the longing of love unrequited, the miracle of growth, is stunning. "Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backward glance." These words by our heroine, Gwen, are as bittersweet as the novel, as bittersweet as her love affair with roses, as bittersweet as her unspoken attraction to Capt. Raley, one of the Canadian soldiers billeted nearby. As she says early in the book, in one of these backward glances, "I sit in this rocking train carriage, years later, words floating around me, wisping down in thin, grey threads. Nothing I can hold in my hands. Smoke, these words are smoke." Gwen recalls overhearing Jane, another of the young woman employed to grow food for the war, read aloud from Wolff's "To the Lighthouse" to one of the Canadian soldiers. As Gwen puts it, "and when I hear that voice [Jane's] polishing those words so that they shine inside me..." Well, all I can say is that Helen Humphreys' words also truly shine.
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