Very gentle read. I have read and enjoyed other books by Jane Davis, but this one was not so gripping.
Really a story about the growth and demise of a pleasure garden.
Robert Cooke's two young sons both die in the space of days, he can not forgive himself and imagines their lives, he starts the gardens as a tribute to them and pictures the growing and p!aying there.
Robert and his wife never get over the loss of their sons and their two daughters are not valued in the same way. Misunderstandings and secrets affect the whole family.I
The challenges of building the garden and maintaining it are well researched.
Thank you Jane and NetGalley.

Once again Jane Davis has come up with an original and engaging premise for her latest book.

Small Eden refers to the gardens bought to life by Robert Cooke at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a tribute to the lost. He enlists the help of an artist Florence and her architect brother Oswald who become an extended part of Robert's family. Florence provides art lessons to his daughter Ida. Likewise the family who are employed, originally to do the back-breaking work and then to maintain the pleasure gardens are integral to the storyline.

There are big subjects covered in this historical novel, the biggest being about not letting fear curtail your life but also the nature of grief, failure and obsession.

A must-read for those who are looking for something original.

Jane Davis has a remarkable skill with words. Just as a great artist can create a masterpiece with a few strokes of the brush, Miss Davis’ characters seem to grow and take form effortlessly.

Her dedication to understanding the historical settings of her novels, the evolution of her characters and the way she shares her curiosity with the reader is pure joy. This is no rambling story, it is a carefully crafted tapestry of the times and how it felt to live then. Britain has been built on and sustained by the unwavering values of the middle class who have been constrained by the lexpectations and the opinions of those presumed to matter, by way of wealth or ancestry. Never mind the eccentric or perverted behaviour of the upper classes or the cruelty of the poverty of the lower classes. It was accepted that the working man drank himself senseless at the expense of his wife and children who were lucky if they were not beaten as well as starved.

Was Robert a good man? He invested heavily in opium knowing that it was used to keep quiet and asleep the children of the women he employed, ruthlessly traded by the British government in a China that did not want it, and exploited by pharmacists and dealers in misery. He refused to acknowledge the growing moral outrage of ordinary Brits against the trade. Yet he could not bring himself to lay off staff or reduce wages as the opium trade declined, instead selling off his Small Eden, a memorial to his dead sons. He wanted desperately, at almost any cost to his pocket or his self esteem, to climb the social ladder with his wife. He did not involve himself in their daughters’ lives yet, when it mattered, he sacrificed social standing by supporting his daughters to the detriment of himself and his wife. Was he right to do so?

This book can be read on many levels. Its easy to read. It’s a good story on its own merits and can be read and enjoyed as a simple story of one man’s dreams and of the lives of those around him. Or it can be read as a literary novel, set in an interesting time of history when fortunes had been made on the back of industry and mechanisation at the expense of unskilled labourers, women were threatening the power balances of society, social mores were beginning to be questioned, women were playing sport and Britain’s might was waning. Perhaps the parakeets were a symbol of the freedom that was sought by some and feared by others.

This is certainly not a period drama. The power of this novel comes from the characters. Florence is my favourite. She is strong and determined, she lives her life on her own terms and cares not a bit for the snobbery of the time. Ida is another strong and complex character. She is Robert’s youngest daughter, falls under the influence of Florence, and grows into a wonderful young woman. Gerard, the youngest Simon of the caretaker has a sense of justice and an unwavering sense of right and wrong that belongs to youth. Hettie is perhaps the greatest, the most pleasant surprise, showing that it is never too late, the circumstances never too confining to become your own self, even in the constraints of the Victorian era.

But it is Robert who touches everyone’s lives. He gives himself little or no credit for the good he has done, those he has moved and encouraged to become better people.

Robert reflects that “It was an act of foolishness, of youthful optimism, and for one brief, shining moment, … it was magnificent.”
He sees his dreams and all that he thought could have been. He has regrets. Yet he is so much more than his dreams.

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys excellent writing and the pleasure of seeing life through the eyes of great characters.

At the time of the Boer Wars, society is changing.

‘Small Eden’ is based on the inkling of a true story, which the author has developed into an enthralling tale.

Robert Cooke has a dream, a grand design: to create a pleasure garden from a chalk pit, as a memorial to his two dead young sons, at least one of whom died due to his lack of care, or so Robert believes.

Financed by, of all things, Robert’s opium-growing business, can the gardens be a success, when both Vauxhall and Cremorne gardens have had to close?

This is a novel about change, loss and readiness, or otherwise, to embrace risk. Along the way, developments such as the Boer Wars, less rigid class barriers, the emergence of the New Woman, the encroachment of the suburbs into the countryside, the dismantling of the opium trade, and the legacy of Darwin’s controversial theories are changing society.

All the characters are well drawn, from Robert’s risk-averse mother Hettie to Florence, the injured artist who transforms Robert’s vision into and actionable design, to Gerrard, the smart working-class boy and his feckless father. I applaud the author’s empathy with Robert and his wife Freya. Doomed to misunderstand each other, neither is portrayed as a monster and neither is to blame for the break-up of their marriage.

I loved this rich book for the quality of the writing and its scope, from South Africa to Scotland.

I shall definitely look out for more novels by Jane Davis.

A lovely cover, a gentle story of…sadly forgettable characters. The different character arcs never quite became engaging enough and the story overall just never coalesced into anything interesting enough to eagerly pursue. The writing quality was fine, but I’m afraid this story was rather boring. 3 stars simply for the quality of the writing, rather than the writing itself.

In Small Eden, we have a work of art carefully crafted with grand vistas and intricate brushstrokes. Jane Davis takes us on a fascinating tour of the late Victorian era as London expands, turning villages and fields into suburbs with all its implications for people and nature.
A visionary entrepreneur engages a family with skill and energy and an artist with imagination to create a pleasure garden on the site of a disused chalk pit. Davis captures the cultural atmosphere of the period and we are treated to a collection of real characters who develop true to the life of the times – none of them a perfect hero or heroine. What differentiates them is their ability to perceive the spirit that underlays nature and relationships; over a period of twenty-five years some understand and grow while others languish in their artificial worlds where money and status rule the day. Here we have business, industrial ‘progress’ and social ambition set alongside the artistry and romance of the nineteenth century fin de siècle. We witness the struggle between the straight-laced and the liberated. The emerging female liberation, the impact of empire and a plethora of other issues from this celebrated period of British history are beautifully portrayed.
Small Eden is a work to get immersed in – one to revisit and savour. I have read this as an e-book but will definitely get a paper copy for my next reading.

Have you ever had the experience when you tell a friend that you loved a book, your friend wants to know what it’s about, and you just go, “Well… uhmmm.. Errr….”? That’s going to be me in this review. I am going to try my best to describe the book but I have no idea where to begin!

Now that you are forewarned, let me attempt a synopsis.

Story:
A small prologue set in 1884 gives us the background of Robert who mistakes the symptoms of scarlet fever in his two toddler sons as signs of teething. When the illness is discovered, his pregnant wife Freya is forced to go into isolation with their four year old girl. But it is too late.
Moving back to 1870. Eight year old Robert is filled with the “itch” of adventure, much to the dismay of his mother Hettie. She does her best to get him to toe the line as she has seen how a family can be destroyed because of adventurous pursuits.
Both these past events set the tone for the main story, which will now proceed in linear order from 1890. A decade after the death of his sons, Robert is a successful businessman in the field of opium production. He decides to construct a ‘pleasure garden’ in their honour, but he never reveals this reason to his wife Freya, who is trying her best to make sure her daughters get the best future through successful marriages.
How this pleasure garden comes into being, functions and affects the lives of all people involved with it forms the rest of the novel.

A literary fiction’s greatest strengths are its writing and its characters. Both are exceptional in this book. Jane’s writing prowess had already made me a fan when I had read ‘A Funeral for an Owl’. This book depicts the same firm control over her pen – excellent descriptions, thought-provoking lines, well-developed characters, superior plot control. Take this line as a sample: “You don't simply grieve for the person who's gone, but for things that might have been.” Straightforward, yet so true.

If you love character-oriented books, you will certainly enjoy the range of characters in this one. Robert, a man with a head full of dreams that he doesn’t want to share with his wife. Freya, who refuses to even take the names of her dead sons and has bound away her grief. Robert’s mother Hettie, who seems to have lost her marbles in her old age by going off on a trek to Scotland. The Reynolds family (Frank and his wife, and their two sons John and Gerrard), who work at the pleasure gardens but each has their own secret agenda. The Hoddy siblings (Oswald and Florence) whose commitment to each other allows them to overcome various problems but not all. Each of these characters gets a strong page space and despite the number of characters, there’s no confusion about who is who. Their distinct personality shines through! Most of the characters can’t be slotted into clear ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories – this layered character development always works better in such fiction.

I had no idea what pleasure gardens were, so to get a glimpse into them was an enlightening exercise. The author captures well Robert’s single-minded focus on his garden, sometimes at the cost of the other people and commitments in his life. The attention to historical detail also comes out in every chapter. Right from people’s clothing to habits, to life in the 1800s, to the rise and fall of pleasure gardens, to the political and religious upheavals because of opium production, it does not feel like you are reading a historical story but living it.

It goes without saying that with so many characters and an overarching plot, this isn’t an easy read. It is slow, there is no effortless plot progress, there’s no central event around which the story is built. At various points in the book, I felt like asking the author, “Where are you going with this?” But trust me, it all comes together beautifully.

I would definitely recommend this book to those who love literary fiction with well-developed but complicated characters and a great slice of history. Not recommended to those who like quick reads (at almost 400 pages, this book requires a lot of patience) or plot-oriented rather than character-oriented fiction.

I kept swinging between 3.75 stars (when the writing seemed to get too slow or when I was lost about where things were going) to 4.5 (when the emotions and the characters blended into one heck of a touching reading experience.) So I will just go with the average of the two ratings, though the ending tempts me to go higher.

4.1 stars.

My thanks to Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op, Rossdale Print Productions, and NetGalley for the DRC of “Small Eden”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

This was an unusual tale, set in the 1890's about grief and loss, love and living a full life. Poppy and Physic garden grower Robert Cooke and his wife Freya have two baby boys, an older girl and a baby on the way. One night one of the boys develops a rash, Freya wants to call out the doctor but Robert thinks Freya is over reacting and that the baby is just teething. By morning the boys are dead. Robert struggles to deal with the consequence of his "mistake" and often imagines how the boys would look and play as they grow. He notices that a chalk pit where he found solace helping out as a twelve year old boy when his own father died is up for sale and he rashly buys it with a plan to redevelop it as a Pleasure Garden, a "small eden" where the boys in his imagination would love to explore and play. Whilst planning the gardens he enlists the help of a wheelchair bound artist and her architect brother who become almost a second family to his youngest daughter. His older daughter is drawn to the son of the family who caretake and tend the pleasure gardens. Robert's mother is also on a quest, after spending most of her life indoors, sedentary and lonely she heads to Scotland to discover where her own father died on a climb and returns a changed woman. The book follows the families through the course of a decade or so and it was really interesting to see how their lives progressed and the toll Robert's obsession with the Gardens had on his life and those around him.

The characters were interesting, the storyline was excellent, and the style of writing was perfect. The first book I have read by this author and I will be keeping my eye out for more in the future. If you enjoy reading a great stories then this book is for you.

Creating a pleasure garden in memorial to his sons' passing from scarlet fever, a man finds himself unable to communicate with his wife over this horrible loss. Late 1800s London is beautifully described in this well written novel.

I’m afraid to say I struggled a little with this book. It’s based on grief, how people deal with it in different ways and how they remake their lives. It is beautifully written and hauntingly evocative but I struggled to really engage with the characters meaning for me it lacked emotional impact. That isn’t to say it’s not a great story, it is and as I said very well written the story just didn’t ‘click’ for me.

This book is worthy of a re-read session. There I said it. A beautifully crafted story of a couple and their loss and how they cope with it in seperate ways and how it affects their lives as it unravels further in the pages of the book. Poignant and deeply in invoking emotions out of readers, this book is absolutely worth it.

This is a beautifully written book with an enchanting storyline and well developed characters. Before I read this book I had never heard of the pleasure gardens but after reading this I will definitely be looking them up more. I wasn't sure whether I would like this book but I really enjoyed it and I can't wait to read it again or read more by the author.

A very different story regarding the Pleasure Gardens that were popular in London primarily during the 17th and 18th centuries. This story revolves around a man who creates a garden in honor of his two sons who died young. The story takes you through the family's life and spares no sympathies. In addition to their family, you will come to know the "gardens" family and how they all intersect. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publishers for an e-arc in exchange for my honest opinion.