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July 1981. As the country prepares to celebrate Prince Charles’ wedding to Lady Diana, Libby wants to be as far away from royal wedding fever as possible. This was an interesting story that explores family connections and the true extent that keeping secrets can have. The characters are all very warming and I enjoyed reading about the three women. They have all suffered in their own ways but grow from their experiences – a lesson we can all learn from. While all this jumping around in timeline and point of view could make, A Secret Garden Affair, more complicated to follow which could have made the layout better for the story arch, at the expense of the reader. The Secret Garden Affair immerses you in the world of beautiful gardens, and difficult family relationships through the eyes of three women - young Libby who has had her heart broken, and the two characters who have been a steady influence on her throughout her life, Elfrida and Bess. Libby heads to Larkspur House looking for stability as a time when she cannot trust her own feelings, but little does she know that former socialite Elfrida and her close friend (and her former lady's maid) Bess have been keeping secrets from her too. Set in the 1970s in the summer of Charles and Diana’s wedding, I found it unusual that the ‘present day’ was still fifty years in the past. On reflection, I think this is intended to highlight the limited choices that women still faced with employment. Attending secretarial school and being office assistants was still an accepted role with the men usually in more dominant careers. Being a woman in the 1970s still meant being there for the husband and creating the perfect family home. Therefore, when Libby’s engagement ends along with her self-employed business share with her ex-best friend, she finds herself drawn to Bess and Elfrida, the constants in her life.
You really get a sense with these women that they're having to deal with losing trust in people and are fearful of being deceived again, which makes it very difficult to move on and trust new people that come into their lives. I really loved the setting as the house and gardens are very much part of them as people and a place where they feel safe to start the trust process and dealing with the personal tragedies that they have faced. From the Sunday Times bestselling author Erica James comes a captivating story that sweeps through sixty years of history, love, and family drama.
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James floods this story with regret and aching loss, exploring how grief and misplaced guilt can divide families, and you feel every heart-wrenching moment with real force - especially the impact of these emotions on mental health. There is a lot of pain being carried around by these characters, and my heartstrings were well and truly tugged, but there is also romance, glamour, friendship and warmth - and over the course of the story the threads come together in forgiveness and hope. Larkspur House felt like a character to me. It wrapped its magic around me (much like it did to Libby and Daniel) and I felt sad when I had to say goodbye. This is a very old-fashioned novel. It's written in an old-fashioned way, and I say this because it contains characters who are privileged and 'other' to what we might consider to be 'everyday'. There's a big old house, left to Elfrida, and there's a Count who provides caviar and a special champagne from his brother's vault, on a boat, during a date. There's a mother who insists her daughter marries a man who has slept with someone else, and the man himself who thinks it's perfectly fine. For me, and I appreciate that Erica James has a massive following, this whole novel came perilously close to cliche, and the layer upon layer of stereotypical characters and situations were too distracting for me to enjoy it for what it is.
Elfrida is certainly a character who didn’t conform to society’s expectations but carved her own path, whether in the parts of the book set in the past or the relatively more modern 1980s. I thought she was a terrific creation and I loved her feistiness and refusal to do what others expected of her. I particularly liked her friendship with Bess who worked for Elfrida originally as a ladies’ maid. The women had shared many life events and were the keepers of each others secrets. They had become so much more than employer and employee over the years and were a huge support for each other.Erica James is an award-winning British author of romance, contemporary, and general fiction stories. She has written several bestselling single novels in her career, including Love & Devotion, Airs & Graces, Hidden Talents, A Breath of Fresh Air, Gardens of Delight, Act of Faith, etc. In addition to these, she has also penned an anthology called What A Woman Wants in collaboration with Maureen Lee and Donna Hay. In 2006, Erica won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award for her book, Gardens of Delight. After that, she won a lot more success in her career as readers all over the world began noticing her work and reading her novels with more interest. Author Erica was born Erica Sullivan in Surrey, England in 1960. She was brought up on Hayling Island, Hampshire, where her family had relocated when she was 4 years old. We witness the passion for creating gardens that sees a character feeling at one with nature. And there is also a grande passion that not even death can break. Life is for living. We need to make the most of each day because we never know when life will be cruelly cut short. Bess herself lives with Elfirda the woman she became a maid to when she was a teenager, although now it is more of a friendship, than master and servant. Though Liby may be running from the present she may find a lot more about their past and how it affects her. This enticing cover had me excited to read this new release from Erica James. The books I have read by this author (so far!) have all been really enjoyable, but I found that this one didn’t capture my heart in quite the same way. I wonder if it is because it is a little similar to a recent book I have read: following a family over decades with secrets being revealed along the way. Appearances were everything. In the past an unmarried mother would be frowned upon. There were some hard choices to be made.
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