Loved this book the author shares with us her love of gardening her plot.She shares the ups and downs of gardening.it really is a delightful read I enjoyed it from beginning to end a really delightful read.#netgalley #octopuspublishing

I will forever remember my wonderful experience reading this lovable, anecdotal book! This inspired me to garden and enjoy nature more, as well as being an enjoyable, wonderful read. Thank you to the author and publisher for the chance to read this novel!

If you are a gardener or love gardening you will love this book.
It's engrossing, entertaining and I loved the style of writing.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I loved this. Charlotte captures the mad, joyous, ridiculous hobby of gardening. Gardening makes you superstitious. I planted these tomatoes after the weird snow last year and got a great harvest, therefore I must plant these after a weird snow this year. Planting onions next to cabbages will drive the cabbagefly away because they stink. These egg shells will keep the slugs away. None of it proven, just passed down, person to person, because it worked once. Gardening is amazing, and this book bleeds the passion for it!

Within Rhapsody of Green, Charlotte Mendelson writes a beautifully heartwarming book about one of her great passions - gardening. Being interested in the topic myself, heavily influenced by my grandparents, it feels a personal read with an immediate friendship between the pages. Perhaps in that, the pivotal aspect to this book is its relatability and how down to earth it is; Mendelson doesn’t pretend to be anything she isn’t which is so refreshing!

I can’t count how many parts made me laugh, smile or grin. This book reached me in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and in a strange way I feel I’ve found a friend. Mendelson paints an honest picture of gardening much unlike typical ‘perfect’ ones seen on TV or online. She interweaves anecdotes, painfully relatable admissions, horror stories, failures and experiences to create the epitome of my love of non-fiction.
I truly enjoyed the experience of reading this book, and would recommend it to both gardeners and non-gardeners alike!

’And this is how it should remain; an unfulfilled fantasy: never disappointing, always possible: a source of perfect, fruitful happiness.’

This reads like a series of articles, which means that you can dip into these whenever you have a spare five minutes. The author takes us on a circuitous journey through her obsession with gardening and the complications of doing it in a tiny, city space. If she were interested in growing flowers this wouldn't be too much of a problem but her passion is for things you. can eat, and for that you need space, or the ability to focus on one crop and be delighted with eating kale 12 months a year. Mendelson does not do this. Her obsession and passion cause her to sprint from new thing to new thing, always trying something out, always experimenting and rarely, it seems, getting anything she grows to produce enough to feed even one person. If you're a keen gardener you will delight in this as Mendelson, despite her protestations, clearly knows her stuff. If you're an amateur and you're hoping for tips, I think you'll find plenty of warnings of what not to do and as you progress you can recall just how bonkers some of this gardening really is.

A Rhapsody in Green is a novel self described as the adventures of a woman in her small town garden. I picked this book up because the new cover is gorgeous and as a person who has killed as many plants as she's kept alive I thought I could grab some tips from this. I was rather disappointed to discover this is actually a book aimed not at beginners but rather at seasoned gardeners looking to laugh over niché topics.

The points made in the text seemed to cycle at times; the discussion about buying too many seeds (I do not?), the listing of a dozen plants (that I couldn't recognise) and then landing on a personal anecdote that at times felt like the only parts of the book worth reading. I feel like this kind of book would be better served as a blog, or even a podcast because it seemed to want thoughts to be echoed back in kind from the audience. The writing often used 'we' suggesting that the experiences were expected to be universal. Tragically, they were not.

Even as the unintended audience, I still found positives to the experience of reading this book. The author shares an infectious enthusiasm for gardening and even though I have no idea what a Catkin is or even have a garden of my own, I enjoyed basking in the clear joy shown through the writing.
It's superbly written and has a really modern and funny vibe to it. I can't say I have the level of passion that the book is begging to have matched in a reader, but passion for the craft is so clear in every chapter of this book that I think anyone with a touch more experience in gardening beyond the casual cactus bought at Tescos might enjoy this.