Review: Gardening with a Ghost by Amanda Meuwissen (Haunted Love)

Gardening with a Ghost by Amanda Meuwissen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was curious about the premise here - gardener who brings plants back to life? Super neat. I guess I should have expected that it wouldn't be a ton about gardening, tragically.

the plot

Instead there's a babbys first murder whodunit, lead by the worlds worst detective (gardener man), for no apparent reason. He's there to fix the garden, and somehow decides "yes I will follow people around (unsneakily), question them (obviously and they notice he's being weird), and decided everything and everyone is Suspicious"

go back to your garden.

the romance

this was, all in all, kind of just whatever. They had instalove vibes though early on, before Peter even found out who the ghost was or what he looked like, which was a little too far for me to buy into, even for instalove. Feel a connection, sure, but they were very dramatic about it when the ghost dude was like a breeze and emotion cloud and nothing else. Just needed a little adjustment on the timing.

the writing

I struggled a bit with the writing, until I realized I could unfocus my eyes a little and skim and then it went okay.

Specific issues I had were:

• very long run on sentences with 20 commas

• oddly stilted language - almost like it wanted to be pseudo historical but didn't make it?

• lots of inconsequential detail - I don't really need to hear the description of every room and every single meal

Overall, this was generally meh. It gets two stars because I was mildly curious enough about the plot to skim to the end instead of DNFing. This book felt like it was gaining pages as I read. Surely it was 400 pages? No?



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