Blog tour: At the Bottom of the Garden by Camilla Bruce
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘Clara Woods is a killer. At the bottom of the garden is a flowerbed, long overgrown, where her late husband rests in peace – or so she always thought.
‘Until the girls arrived.
‘Lily and Violet are her adolescent nieces, recently orphaned and in urgent need of care.
‘Raising teenagers is certainly not what Clara had envisioned for herself, but her funds are drying up and the girls come with a hefty sum attached.
‘There is only one problem: both girls are untrained witches, with uncanny powers which they inherited from their mother. Lily can literally see how people feel and knows when they are lying. And young Violet can see the dead man at the bottom of the garden. In fact, she can see all the dead, and call them back.
‘Soon Clara is surrounded by apparitions. Lily and Violet have become a liability – and know far more than they should. A war waging in the house, and only one side can win…’
In At the Bottom of the Garden, by Camilla Bruce, we meet Violet and Lily Webb, aged nine and 14 respectively, when they’re tragically orphaned and have no choice but to move in with their father’s half-sister, the dastardly Clara Woods.
Not only has Clara taken in her nieces purely to get her hands on as much of her late half-brother’s money as possible, but she has a dark past, having killed more than one person to satisfy her greed. It doesn’t take the girls long to learn this, as Violet is gifted/cursed with the ability to see and assist the dead.
As a result, Clara finds herself plagued by vengeful ghosts – but she also spies a money-making opportunity, and forces Violet to channel desperate clients’ dead relatives, even though doing so makes the young girl weak and ill.
Can Violet and Lily (who has special talents of her own) put a stop to Clara’s exploitation and finally bring about her comeuppance?
I found At the Bottom of the Garden highly absorbing, and read swathes of it at a time. The frequent change of perspective between Clara, Lily, and Violet, and the way there’s always something fascinating and/or delightfully scary happening or being revealed, kept me engaged throughout.
Violet’s gift and the logic underpinning it are well thought-through, and her various encounters with dead people and animals – and their consequences for Clara – are imaginative and varied. The true extent of Lily’s gift isn’t revealed until later on, but it’s similarly inventive, and I enjoyed discovering the backstory behind their supernatural inheritance.
While the pair’s privileged background and pending material inheritance had the potential to make them difficult to sympathise with, the author succeeds in completely swerving this and creating two very likeable characters. It’s not just that we feel sorry for them, but also that they’re genuinely considerate and caring.
I found the sisters’ relationship particularly uplifting and endearing. As the elder, Lily protects and nurtures Violet as much as she can, and doesn’t think twice about taking risks to keep her safe. Right from the start, it’s of utmost importance to the pair that they stay together, even if it does mean living with a mean aunt. I also loved the bond that formed between them and Clara’s housekeeper, Dina.
Clara is a compelling fairy tale-esque villain – I could practically feel the malice coming off the page every time we switched back to her narrative, and her thoughts, unhampered as they are by conscience or decency, are often very entertaining. According to Clara, riches are simply what the world owes her for not being as favoured or wealthy as her half-brother, and the murders she committed were totally justified.
We learn about Clara’s childhood – unlike the girls’ father, she was the child of an ill-starred marriage and grew up impoverished and neglected – and while this gives depth to her character and explains some things about her, your sympathy for her remains limited because those things don’t determine your behaviour as an adult. Either there was something not-quite-right about Clara from the start, or she actively chose a path of bitterness and greed.
At the Bottom of the Garden is enjoyably creepy and surprisingly heartwarming.