This book, unfortunately, didn't hit the mark for me.

I kind of expected female empowerment, a magical garden, and a main character who is a bit of a social recluse, by choice. What we get instead is a lot of abuse of the female characters in the story, a garden with unclear magic, and a bit of a doormat main character who pines for more, but doesn't take action.

I think this book could've been cut back a lot. Everything is so painstakingly snail-paced. It takes so long for the story to get anywhere, and it's overly wordy. I'm a lover of a slow burn, but so much of this book felt like filler. The characters don't do anything, and the story just unfolds around them. They aren't dynamic, and they all fall very flat. The plot lines felt weak to me; there are quite a few incidences where the driving factor of the plot is just an irrational dislike of our main character. The story relies a lot on a historical - victorian - plot line of women being labelled hysterical by male figures in their lives, but it just didn't feel convincing here.

Almost all of the male characters are just terrible for no reason, and almost all of the female characters just revolve around that terribleness. Harriet (our FMC) has so many nudges in the right direction, and she just gives up again and again, but it feels like it is just to drive the plot forward. There's also an attempted SA that feels very brushed off while also being a driving factor for the plot. The book is marketed as Harriet learning to harness the power of her garden, but she mostly ignores it, wills it to be tame, and then simply runs away when the going gets tough... and relies on her garden to save her.

Overall, the garden was pretty cool. Some of the resolutions felt satisfying. I do like how the author writes, and I liked some of the concepts. I just think that this story wasn't well executed, and I often felt bored while reading because I couldn't get attached to the characters or plot.

𝓣𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓴 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓽𝓸 𝓝𝓮𝓽𝓰𝓪𝓵𝓵𝓮𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓢𝓸𝓾𝓻𝓬𝓮𝓫𝓸𝓸𝓴𝓼 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓪𝓷 𝓐𝓡𝓒 𝓬𝓸𝓹𝔂 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼 𝓫𝓸𝓸𝓴, 𝓲𝓷 𝓮𝔁𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓰𝓮 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓶𝔂 𝓱𝓸𝓷𝓮𝓼𝓽 𝓻𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀.

I want to start by saying I've seen book marketing that classes The Peculiar Garden Of Harriet Hunt as cosy fantasy, and it's not that. Please check trigger warnings for domestic violence and SA before you read this one.
Centred around Harriet, our main protagonist, who must use her magical ability with plants to save herself from the ill-intentions from the men around her, this is an enchanting and magical story
Harriet is all alone after her abusive father disappeared, leaving his debts behind. The only company Harriet has is her garden, which responds to her emotions. Deemed too peculiar for victorian society, Harriet prefers the solace of the crumbling walls of Sunnyside house.
When suspicion grows around the disappearance of her father and whether Harriet is involved, she marries a charming man to help protect her, but looks can be deceiving, and she may have just unwillingly drawn herself into an even more dangerous situation.

I was immediately captivated by Harriet's story and felt great empathy for her. She's not had an easy life at all, and as a reader, I wanted to see her break free of the abuse she's suffered desperately.
I loved the magical elements in this book, and the imagery of the garden was written beautifully. There's plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and I didn't anticipate the ending at all, which I always love. The ending was also brilliant, and I love it when you finish a book and feel satisfied, which this one gave. Overall, I really enjoyed this one and would recommend it if you like historical fiction with a dash of magic. It's very readable and I would be interested in reading more by Chelsea in the future.

Although in the end, all of the loose ends in this story were neatly tied up, getting to that point was quite difficult. To start, there were too many plot lines going on and rarely were they ever really explained. Harriet Hunt is a woman who is alone in the world. Her father is missing, her only friend is moving away, her mother died when she was young. Her freedom (and loneliness) takes a turn when an inspector shows up at her door asking about her missing father. Harriet decides to take it upon herself to find him and get the inspector out of her life and this is when the story truly begins. The reader is introduced to the missing father plotline immediately, but all we know is that he’s gone. Then there’s a random man who proposes to her within about 2 hours of them knowing each other. This is weird and not really explained. We learn that Harriet’s mother died in a terrible accident that had something to do with Harriet herself, but that’s all we know and it really isn’t explained. There are some odd letters arriving from a man named Nigel Davies, but the letters explain very little nothing comes of them until the last fifteen pages of the book.
On top of the multitude of shallowly explained plot lines, the main character is annoying. She makes rash decisions and takes a “woe is me” approach to everything she encounters. If she had taken the opportunity presented to her by Eunice at the beginning of the story, the rest of it would have never happened. She makes excuses for her husband’s abuse, at one point describing it as “erratic behavior” and tells herself she deserves it for what happened to her mom (which is still unclear to the reader) years ago. There wasn’t one point in this book where I thought Harriet was standing up for herself or making decisions in her best interest.
She also was clearly not socialized as a child because ANY and ALL situations in which she needed to have a conversation with someone, it looked like this: *character says something to her* “Harriet had no idea what to say, so she said nothing.”, “Harriet tried to think of something interesting or cool to say and couldn’t so she said nothing.”
Annoying.
The reason I’m giving this two stars is because everything ended up being tied up and there was a twist that I didn’t see coming at the end.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC and my sincerest apologies that I am so bad about reviewing things on time. :,)

This book starts out with a newspaper article detailing the disappearance of one Christian Comstock and his wife. Where have they gone? What has happened to them? To answer these questions, we must hit the rewind button and begin six months earlier. That's the set up for what turns out to be a novel with a very interesting concept. A lonely woman, a missing father, a once luxurious house now barren of extravagances, and, we mustn't forget, a wild garden that is far more than it seems; these are the elements that make up the center of a twisting, turning plot line. Are you intrigued? If so, I encourage you to travel with Harriet Hunt through her garden to discover its mysteries and its secrets, but don't let your guard down or you just might be in for a surprise.

2.5 ⭐️

This fantastical mystery felt as if it struggled to find its flow, seemingly lacking direction. I pushed through the slow beginning as I wanted to make sure I gave myself ample time to get pulled into the story, but, admittedly, I contemplated DNFing it about half way through as it still felt like it was dragging it's feet. Understanding that perhaps this book just wasn't my speed/wheelhouse, I tried to move forward with an open mind. Sadly, I don't feel that was entirely the issue.

Much of the story could have possibly been condensed. Most notably her childhood recollections. There were moments that I felt moved the story along rather well, but they almost felt rushed and out of rhythm with the rest of the story.

While I really wanted the main issue to be that this book just wasn't for me, I truly think it could have benefited from some better editing.

When I attended Holly Black’s book tour earlier this year, she shared that Wren, her main character in The Prisoner’s Throne series, was hard to write because she wouldn’t “protag.” Meaning that Wren did not want to participate in the events unfolding around her, which made her a very interesting character to follow. Well, I have another book for you that features a leading lady who also wants to remove herself from the narrative. This time, there’s a young Victorian woman who would much rather stay at home than participate in the patriarchal world showcased in Chelsea Iversen’s novel, The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt.

Harriet Hunt’s father has gone missing, so she takes full advantage of the freedom his absence grants her. That doesn’t mean she walks the neighborhood or fills her social calendar, Harriet was never allowed such frivolities growing up at Sunnyside. Instead, she entombs herself in the dreary home, tending to her garden and welcoming the infrequent visits from her cousin. But when an inspector begins to question Harriet about her father’s disappearance, she realizes how vulnerable she is. Harriet is desperate to find a way to prove her innocence and with few options granted to an unchaperoned young woman, Harriet will place her trust in the people who begin to take an interest in her, for better or for worse.

There’s a lot of mystery to uncover in Harriet’s story. Her father has disappeared, the circumstances around her mother’s death are unknown, a strange man seems adamant in courting her, and the garden is alive and attuned to Harriet. The details surrounding these mysteries are revealed at a snail’s pace, and most, if not all, of the answers arrive in one big explosion at the end of the story. By the time these details were revealed, I had lost interest in the mysteries completely because so little was shared for the first 80% of the story that I had to shift my focus to Harriet’s survival instead. I also would have loved way more exposition on Harriet’s connection with the garden. It was such a central part of the story, but it’s not fully explored in a meaningful way. The mysteries hovered around the edges of this story, and instead, the focus stays on our shy protagonist navigating the worst nightmare possible.

At first, I was frustrated by Harriet’s inaction throughout this story. She is not a dynamic protagonist, and she meets most of the events unfolding around her with a grim, resolute acceptance. The horrors keep happening to a dispirited protagonist, who is not a grab-a-bull-by-the-horns type of character. Harriet’s situation is horrible, and I was suffocating under the constraints of her life as things kept getting worse. Eventually, I realized that her lack of action did a wonderful job of exacerbating the lack of control in her own life for the reader. I grew frustrated with Harriet’s inability to make a move, but it made me feel the helplessness that Harriet was experiencing. As a woman in Victorian England, her world was determined and controlled by the men in her family, so she truly did not have many options to save herself from the nightmare. I came to appreciate our more reserved protagonist who did not make the waves herself but found ways to seize an opportunity in the openings that were created for her.

The Peculiar Garden likes to play around with the illusion of safety and the things, or people, we think will keep us safe. Harriet searches externally for her safety, which places the power and control in the hands of those outside forces. Her response to fear rids herself of all agency and she loses so much of herself along the way. Harriet kept her social circle so small, it only allowed that fear to fester and turn on her. It effectively kept her isolated while also making her vulnerable to kindness of any sort. She’s not the big, bold protagonist found in most stories, but I like the way Iversen develops Harriet in her own quiet way to conquer her fears.

The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt takes on the personality of its timid protagonist. Instead of flash or daring, it displays the quiet calm in the eye of Harriet’s storm and her strength to withstand it all.

Rating: The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt - 6.5/10

I ended up DNF-ing this book. The cover and description made it appear to be a cozy fantasy. This felt like grimy depressive Victoria horror without the horror. It's a book filled with trauma and depression. This just wasn't for me. It was written well but it was not something I wanted to finish nor did I care what happened.

While it a bit of a rollercoaster, it was an interesting book that kept me wanting to know more. I will admit, it started off quite slow and left me a bit worried for if it would keep my attention, but it surprised me. The last handful of chapters happen quick and really pick up the pace, which I appreciated.

I do really appreciate Harriet's character and the development. How we see her really go from a naive young women to a confident one who learns how to immerse herself into society regardless of her past. It of course is infuriating watching her go through all the abuse she has endured and constantly ask yourself why doesn't she just leave to go live with Eunice and why not sooner? But, I think that part really shows you how hard it is for people to leave abuse and or not realize how much time has passed them by with all the manipulation they have endured.

Botanical gothic horror blooms into a freely flourishing garden. What an absolute delight The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt is. It's both a historical mystery with magical realism and a story about freedom and embracing your true self. And while it initially feels more like a spooky season read, it's one to pick up now.

Set in Victorian small village England, Chelsea Iversen has selected specific details anchoring it there, notably a man's ability to involuntarily commit his wife or child to an asylum. (It otherwise didn't feel particularly English to me). Harriet as a young woman is a neighborhood oddity and recluse, lonely, and captive in her father's house, after the death of her mother. She's always had a unique relationship with the garden, and it too, is part of the reason she can't leave even after her father goes missing. With debts mounting, Harriet decides she needs to find out what happened to him, even as she recognizes she doesn't really have the social skills for such an investigation.

While there are some very dark turns in this book, it's Harriet's journey and her discovery that she's really not alone that makes it such a worthwhile read. If I say any more than that, I'll spoil it. If you enjoy gothic horror, mysteries and a little magical realism, check out The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt.

CW: domestic abuse, child neglect

Harriet Hunt finds herself living completely alone in her decaying Victorian home after the disappearance of her abusive father, her mother having passed under unfortunate circumstances years ago. She takes comfort in her bond with the home's garden; she and the garden understand and protect each other in a magical fashion. Harriet's sole purpose in life seems to be caring for the ivy, roses, and plum tree that grow there; she doesn't have much curiosity about the world around her or the events that happen to her. When a charming man seems to be the first person to see the true appeal of Harriet beyond her odd quirks, Harriet accepts his proposal and rushes into marriage, only to find that he is as sinister and scheming as her missing father.

Things I enjoyed about this book: the lush descriptions of the plants and their activity, the side character Amelia who isn't afraid to question or take action when Harriet seems perpetually hesitant. I like the air of mystery and wondering what would happen if she and the plants were pushed past their limits.

Things that didn't work: the main character is so passive and incurious. She basically accepts the abuse of the men around her without trying to escape for most of the story. We know she has power over the plants and they want to help her, but she doesn't harness them as she could. So much of the story was repetitive, cycling through angry men and a garden that responds to her. I would have loved if she took more agency in investigating all the odd occurrences around her, instead of seemingly just dissociating.

Thank you so much to Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley for this book!

This was a whimsical and enchanting read. The story unfolds in a magical garden, where Harriet discovers secrets that challenge her understanding of herself and her world. Iversen’s prose is beautifully descriptive, making the garden feel almost alive.

I loved the unique premise and the imaginative elements throughout the narrative. The character development was strong, particularly Harriet’s journey of self-discovery. However, there were moments when the pacing lagged, especially in the middle, leaving some plot threads feeling a bit unresolved.

Overall, this is a delightful blend of magic and introspection, making it a great pick for anyone looking for a charming escape into a world of wonder.

I loved The Witches at the End of the World. So of course I super excited to read The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt by Chelsea Iversen.
Loved the story, the setting, and the magic. This was well-written and easily consumed.
Iversen has created a captivating tale that weaves a spellbinding narrative. I found myself utterly engrossed, as the magic infused into every page kept me on the edge of my seat, eager to unravel the next twist in their mystical adventure.

When I picked this book up I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I have to say I really enjoyed it! It was this great mix of historical fiction and magical realism. I loved the world building and of course, Harriet’s garden!

Harriet Hunt has always been a little peculiar. She had a special connection to her garden and never wanted to leave her Victorian London estate. Her abusive father had been missing and frankly she couldn’t care less…until an inspector comes knocking and suggests Harriet may have something to do with his disappearance. She decides to marry a man who doesn’t mind her peculiarities to protect herself…but does he have even worse intentions than her father?

I really liked Harriet. She was smart and strong and perfectly peculiar! She just wanted to exist in her happy place and follow her passions but sadly as a woman she wasn’t able to do that. She always felt the pressure of pretending not to be different or “peculiar.”

My heart broke for her and the abuse she suffered. While this story does have some darker themes, I thought it was well written and felt very authentic. This story also has some great friendships and a very special garden.

No spoilers here, but I was very satisfied with the ending! We get to see Harriet fight to take control of her life and maybe she gets a little bit of magical help along the way.

✨What to Expect
🇬🇧Victorian Era London
🌷Historical Fiction
🌹Gothic Fantasy Vibes
🪻Magical Realism
🪴A Girl & Her Garden
💐Friendship

While I was reading this book it felt reminiscent of a different story but I couldn’t put my finger on which one and I’ve just figured it out a week later. It feels similar to We Have Always Lived in the Castle but not at all the same.

I LOVE when a man chooses to gaslight the wrong woman. It really tickles my feminine rage in such a satisfying way.

There were parts of this book that felt a little redundant but overall I really enjoyed it, especially the fact that the garden was like the best friend willing to do what had to be done.

Would you like to have a garden that takes care of itself? Takes care of any problems that come looking for you?

Harriet Hunt has one. The house she lives in might be in shambles after her father mysteriously left but the garden itself grows. It creeps and crawls and hides...things.

Harriet is used to being confined to her home so even with her father gone she doesn't like to venture beyond the gate. When she does she gets strange looks.

When an inspector begins asking questions about her father, Harriet must seek help. That appears in the form of a new friend and then husband. Soon though, it appears that her new husband might be worse than her father and that there's a dark plot created by the men around her. To free herself and discover the truth, she must learn to channel the power of her strange, magical garden.

This book is great for showing what life was like for women in Victorian society. It's atmospheric and the descriptions of the garden are lovely. The pace is a little slow for me but readers who appreciate immersion and detail and stories about women persevering will love it.

Thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark for the chance to read!

I am officially a fab if Chelsea Iversen.

Once again, beautiful narration keeps you hooked to the story of Harriet Hunt and her magical garden. Darker and more peculiar than the witches novel they have, this was a different form of magic that i found very interesting. Chelsea writes fantastic endings and they really close out their novels beautifully.

After her fathers mysteruous appearance, Harriet only finds comfort in her garden. Once married - to a man she may have been wrong about- she also comes to find safety in it as it protects her... So much imaginative/magical realism is experienced through the pages of this slightly darker undertoned book you just have to read it to understand why it's good!

I liked this one it was intriguing with gothic aspects but overall it was a good read and I. Enjoyed .it . The author has a way with depicting a sense of place .
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me review book

'True magic is found among the bluebells and brambles" and true magic is found on the pages of this book. This book took me on a journey right along with Harriet Hunt. I love the writing and the fact that it kept me reading, kept me enthralled and on the edge of my seat says it all.

I love teh quirkiness of not only the characters but of the story itself. There was plenty of mystery, there was intrigue and at times it was a bit of a guessing game, not knowing where the story was going or what the characters were up to. A great read and I enjoyed it immensely.

Thank you NetGalley adn Sourcebooks Landmark for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

Harriet lives a solitary life after her dad leaves mysteriously, stuck in the house she grew up in, haunted by her past. She's viewed as a danger to herself and those around her because Peculiar things happen with her garden... Harriet has to save herself and embrace her wild magic.

I got this ARC the day before the book's release... and i read it in one day, I could not put it down! I ran to Barnes and Nobles the next morning and bought a physical copy! The story moves slowly at first, in a dreamlike way... lulling you in before it sinks its claws in. I really enjoyed the pacing, I think it worked well for this story and for our main character, Harriet. It's part mystery part dark fairy tail. You spend most of the book wondering what's happened in Harriets past and what will happen with her future. Side note: I've never been so envious of a garden in my life!

The men around her startle me. They noticed this floating wraith of a girl (term used advisedly) at all. She wanders lonely as a cloud around her unhappy home until, at the bitter end of this slogging tale, she has blinding revelatory things occur to her.

Women not in charge of their own lives aren't a lot of fun to read about, however period-appropriate this reality might be. When events finally goad her into action, she *still* drifts! Pretty sentences do not make up for a vacuous passive heroine (Victorian sense heavily implied) to this old man reader. YMMV, and you might see this book's feminism, so three stars.