Review 540: At Hawthorn Time

At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison
My rating: 3.25 of 5 stars

A somewhat slow meandering book focused on several people in a small village in Great Britain. The book starts with something yet to come, a bad car accident.

We follow several people for a main point of view, starting with a homeless man who is walking the old roads. He’s very connected to nature and disconnecting to people. He shouldn’t leave London after being released from jail, but he can’t be in a big city and the jail nearly broke him entirely. Now, he is heading to the farming village of Lodeshill to help with the harvest cutting asparagus.

Next is Kitty and Howard. They moved about a year ago to Lodeshill and living in the country was Kitty’s dream, not Howard’s who would rather have stayed in London. The kids are out on their own now and it’s just the two of them and their marriage is in a bit of a shamble.

Then there’s Jamie. He’s a young man working two jobs now and is working on his car dreaming of how that will be when it’s done and he can show it off. Jamie is an interesting character, often thinking about his past with his next door neighbor friend he no longer knows since the suddenly left some years ago.

Nature and the outdoors are prominent, as is how things are changing, nothing is the same. It is village life here with these people and a few others. It all comes to culmination to what came at the start of the book. It was an okay book. I liked the writing style.