Sue Bridehead (A Pseudonym)'s Reviews > A Garden Lost in Time

Though I always enjoy Mr. Aycliffe's writing style, I think this is one of his weaker books. I found several inconsistencies that seem purely accidental, including a complete passage that gets repeated nearly word-for-word later in the book. This is a multiple narrator story told through letters and journal entries, and at times you get the sense that certain parts of this book were written as stand-alone short stories about a haunted house. I suspect the author drew a bunch of notes together and threaded a storyline through them at the last moment to call this a novel. Nothing quite hangs together, a sense of menace never really accumulates, and the ending is unconvincing.

Still, it was compelling enough that I read it in a single day. I'm glad I ordered it used off Amazon--it came to me from a library in Wales, with Welsh language stamps and markings inside the front cover. Talk about getting a sense of authenticity...