“Susannah Misselthwaite was gazing up at the brightness of the blue sky when the deer leapt in front of the car. She never knew what happened. Her husband Guy, Professor of Botany, hides from his grief in his greenhouse - without Susannah, everything is lost. Meanwhile, little Felix pores over photographs of his mother who is slipping from his memory more each day. Happiest sitting in the branches of a tree in the university's botanical garden, away from the emptiness of home, he presides over t More...

When a book is called A Bit of Earth and the main character has the surname Misselthwaite (spelling?) it is obviously trying to link itself to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (the hall is called Misselthwaite and there is a chapter called A Bit of Earth, as that is what Mary asks her uncle for). So I was expecting a book about the healing power of nature, which isn't really what this is about. There is less about the garden than I thought there would be.

But although ther More...

The premise of this book was really disturbing to me - but in truth it's a bit of a romance. I thought the characters were often true to life, although I also found that some of them were introduced without any apparent reason. Overall though I enjoyed the book's soft of "time heals all" message and the interesting way in which the garden plays a role. Very British though so some things didn't have as much meaning to me as they would to someone who grew up in the UK.