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The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston Review - A Romance You Didn't Know You Needed
- Joao Nsita
- Jun 11
- 10 min read
Opening Hook
There's a particular kind of book that finds you at exactly the right moment. You don't go looking for it. It finds you — on a quiet Sunday afternoon when the light comes through the window at a slant, or late at night when you should be sleeping but somehow you're still turning pages. The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston is that kind of book.
I've been a fan of Ashley Poston's writing for a long time. Her books have this almost unfair ability to feel like home and heartbreak at the same time. She writes characters you want to sit with over a long meal, people who carry their grief softly, who love imperfectly, who reach toward connection the way flowers reach toward light. And with The Someday Garden, she has done something truly special — she's taken the bones of The Secret Garden and rebuilt them into something that is entirely, unmistakably hers.
From the very first page, I was in. The prose is warm and unhurried. The world she creates is specific enough to feel real and magical enough to feel like a dream you don't want to wake from. The characters breathe. The romance unfolds with a patience that most contemporary love stories never allow themselves. There's no manufactured drama, no grand misunderstanding that could be solved with one honest conversation. Instead, there is real, slow, aching emotional intimacy — the kind that takes your breath away precisely because it sneaks up on you.
This is the kind of romance novel I read and immediately want to press into the hands of everyone I love. If you've been waiting for a summer book that will make you feel everything — and I mean everything — your wait is over. The Someday Garden is here, and it is extraordinary.
What This Book Is About
The Someday Garden is a contemporary romance inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden, but don't let that label make you think it's a retelling in any traditional sense. Ashley Poston has taken the emotional DNA of the original — the healing power of hidden places, the way neglect and grief can seal a person off from the world, the transformative force of being truly seen — and transplanted it into a story that is wholly modern and deeply personal.
Our protagonist is Marigold, a woman who has spent most of her adult life working in the shadow of her late mother, a celebrated botanist and garden designer whose legacy has defined everything about Marigold's career and sense of self. After her mother's death, Marigold inherits a travel journal and a cryptic set of instructions that lead her to a small inn in rural England — the same inn where her parents had their great romance decades ago, long before Marigold was born.
The inn is run by a quiet, reserved man named Will, who carries his own sorrows with a kind of dignified silence that Marigold finds both infuriating and magnetic. Will is protective of the inn's secrets, particularly a walled garden at the back of the property that has been locked and untended for years. When Marigold begins to suspect that this garden holds clues about her mother's past, she starts to piece together a story she was never told — and in doing so, she begins to understand not just who her mother was, but who she herself wants to be.
What makes this book so beautiful is that it is not a mystery in any conventional sense. The secrets Marigold uncovers are emotional rather than plot-driven. They don't shock so much as they illuminate. And as Marigold and Will grow closer — through shared meals, late evenings in the garden, and the slow revelation of each other's private worlds — the romance between them builds with a tenderness that is almost unbearable in the best possible way. Poston never rushes it. She trusts her readers to wait for it. And when it finally arrives, it feels earned in a way that most romance novels never quite manage.
Author's Style and Craft
Ashley Poston has always been a writer with a distinctive voice — warm, precise, emotionally intelligent — but in The Someday Garden, she's operating at a new level. Her prose here has a quality I can only describe as luminous. She writes the natural world with a sensory richness that makes the garden feel like a character in its own right. You can smell the soil and the roses. You can feel the cool damp of an English morning. She makes you want to put down the book and go outside.
Her dialogue is equally accomplished. Will and Marigold talk around things before they talk toward them, and Poston captures this beautifully — the subtext beneath every exchange, the way two people who are falling in love often speak in a kind of code before they find the courage to be direct. The banter is sharp without being performative, and the moments of genuine vulnerability land with real emotional weight.
What sets Poston apart from many contemporary romance authors is her structural patience. She is not interested in plot for plot's sake. She is interested in interiority — in the inner lives of her characters, in the way the past shapes the present, in the small moments of connection that change people. The Someday Garden is proof that you can write a page-turning romance without a single car chase or melodramatic twist.
Themes and Deeper Meaning
At its heart, The Someday Garden is a book about inheritance — not the legal kind, but the emotional kind. What do we take from the people who raised us? What do we carry without realizing it? What do we need to put down in order to grow?
Marigold's relationship with her mother is complicated in the way that real relationships with complicated parents always are. She loved her deeply and was, in many ways, shaped almost entirely by her. But her mother's legacy is also a weight she has been carrying for years without acknowledging how heavy it has become. The novel treats this dynamic with extraordinary care and nuance. Poston doesn't ask us to judge the mother or to forgive her. She simply asks us to understand her — and through that understanding, to see Marigold more clearly.
The garden itself serves as a beautiful extended metaphor for all of this. Gardens require tending. They require patience. They require you to accept that some things die and that death is part of the cycle, not the end of it. Poston uses this metaphor without ever hitting you over the head with it. It lives quietly in the background of every scene.
There is also a strong thread about grief and what it does to love — how loss can make us afraid to open ourselves to more loss, how the safest thing sometimes feels like closing off, and how real courage is found in the choice to stay open anyway. If you've enjoyed our writing on emotionally resonant romance on That Love Podcast's romance book recommendations, you'll recognize this kind of romance as exactly the type we champion here: books that don't just give you butterflies, they give you something to think about long after the last page.
The themes here also connect strongly to ideas we explored in our 10 Must-Read Romance Books of June 2025 — summer as a season for emotional reckoning, and how the best romance novels use setting to mirror inner transformation.
What This Book Gets Absolutely Right
The slow burn is exquisite. Poston understands that the tension between two people who are falling in love is the whole point. She milks every almost-touch and charged glance with complete mastery, and the eventual resolution is so satisfying precisely because she made us wait for it.
The setting does real emotional work. The inn, the English countryside, and especially the walled garden are rendered so vividly and meaningfully that they function almost as characters. The sense of place in this novel is extraordinary and rare.
Grief is handled with honesty. Both Marigold and Will have sustained real losses, and Poston refuses to treat grief as a simple obstacle to be overcome. She honors it as something that lives alongside love, not in opposition to it.
The mother-daughter backstory is deeply moving. The way Poston gradually reveals the truth about Marigold's mother — through the journal, through the garden, through Will's memories of her — is masterful storytelling. It's the kind of revelatory narrative layering that makes literary fiction fans love romance novels.
The romance feels genuinely mutual. Will and Marigold are both active participants in their love story. Neither is simply reacting to the other. They both choose each other, repeatedly and consciously, which makes the romance feel respectful and real.
Where the Book Could Have Gone Further
Will's backstory could use more depth. While Marigold is fully realized, Will's interior life is somewhat underexplored. We understand what he has lost, but we don't always understand the full texture of who he is outside of the inn and his grief.
The secondary characters at the inn could be more distinct. There are a handful of guests and staff members who appear throughout the book and feel a little interchangeable at times. A bit more specificity in these supporting roles would have added richness.
The pacing in the second act slows somewhat. Around the midpoint, the novel settles into a comfortable rhythm that, while beautiful, occasionally borders on inert. Some readers may find themselves wanting the plot to move a touch faster before the final act picks up.
Books to Read If You Loved This One
The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould – If you love atmospheric settings, buried secrets, and emotional depth in your romance, this YA gothic novel delivers all three in a gloriously cinematic package.
Beach Read by Emily Henry – Another contemporary romance that uses setting beautifully and centers on a writer doing emotional excavation while falling in love. The emotional intelligence here is similar to Poston's.
The Cartographer of Unknown Worlds by T. Kingfisher – For readers who want more of that magical realist quality — real world with something ineffable shimmering at the edges — this is a wonderful next read.
Who Should Read This Book
The Someday Garden is for readers who love slow-burn romance, beautifully written prose, and emotionally complex characters. It's for anyone who has ever had a complicated relationship with a parent and needed to see that love and difficulty can coexist. It's for Bookstagram readers who have been waiting for a summer romance that has real literary weight.
If you've been following our coverage of emotionally resonant romance reads — including our Book Review of Daydreamer by Susie Tate — you know this is the kind of book we were made to talk about.
Content warnings: Grief (parental loss), emotional neglect in the past, mild anxiety.
How This Book Made Me Feel
I read The Someday Garden over the course of two days, and I did not want it to end. There were moments — especially in the final third — where I had to put the book down just to sit with what I was feeling. Not because it was painful, but because it was so exactly right. There's a scene in the walled garden near the end of this book that I won't describe in detail, but I will say it made me cry in the best way — the way you cry when something beautiful happens and you feel grateful just to be alive to witness it, even in fiction.
Poston writes love as a form of attention. To be loved in her world is to be truly seen. And as someone who believes deeply in that idea — who has built an entire podcast around it — reading this book felt like being understood. That's the highest compliment I can pay any piece of art.
Final Verdict
The Someday Garden is one of the best romance novels of 2026. Full stop. It is the kind of book that reminds you why you fell in love with reading, and why the romance genre at its best can do things that no other genre can do. Ashley Poston has written something genuinely beautiful here — a story about grief and gardens and the courage it takes to grow.
Do yourself a favour and pick this up immediately. You won't regret it.
👉 Grab your copy of The Someday Garden on Amazon and start reading this weekend. You deserve it.
About the Author
Ashley Poston is the bestselling author of The Dead Romantics, A Novel Love Story, and several beloved YA novels. Her work is known for its warmth, emotional depth, and deeply human characters. She has become one of the defining voices of modern contemporary romance, beloved by millions of readers around the world.
Visit her official website at ashleyposton.com for updates on upcoming books, events, and more.
From the ThatLovePodcast Team
At That Love Podcast, we believe love stories — in books, on screen, and in real life — have the power to change us. If this review resonated with you, subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a new recommendation. And if you've already read The Someday Garden, come find us on social media and tell us what you thought. We love talking books with you.
FAQs
1. Is The Someday Garden a retelling of The Secret Garden? It is inspired by The Secret Garden but not a direct retelling. Ashley Poston takes the emotional themes of the classic — healing, hidden places, transformation — and reimagines them in a contemporary romance setting. You don't need to have read the original to enjoy this book.
2. Is The Someday Garden part of a series? The Someday Garden is a standalone novel. It works beautifully on its own and requires no prior knowledge of Poston's other books, though fans of her previous work will find familiar thematic threads.
3. How spicy is The Someday Garden? The romance is a slow burn with emotional intensity rather than explicit heat. It is on the sweeter, more literary end of the contemporary romance spectrum — think closed door to barely open door.
4. What genre is The Someday Garden? It's contemporary romance with magical realist undertones. The magic is subtle — more atmosphere than plot device — making it accessible even for readers who don't typically gravitate toward fantasy elements.
5. Where can I buy The Someday Garden? You can find The Someday Garden on Amazon, at your local bookshop, or through Thriftbooks for a more affordable option.
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