IT’S tricky when a friend asks you to review a book they’ve written.
What if it’s rubbish, what do you say? Do you damn it with faint praise?
Luckily there was no such issue with Margot Bish’s novel ‘A Moment in Time’.
The tale stars Margot as herself, a self-employed gardener, who stumbles into and out of ‘time slips’ until she’s transported back to Elizabethan England.
What follows is a story that sees our heroine plunged into adventure after adventure all the while trying to get back to modern times without anyone realising that she’s from the 21st century.
At its heart lies the timelessness of working the land and gardening itself.
The modern world may have a host of labour-saving devices to help till the soil, but in its most basic form it still boils down to using a spade or a fork to do the digging.
And the real beauty of it is that all the action happens right on our doorstep, at Shurnock Court near Feckenham, and at Coughton Court, long before Redditch was ever thought of.
Fans of the novels of Kate Mosse and Diana Gabaldin may spot similarities in their time travelling heroines, but there it ends.
Margot Bish, wielding secateurs and trowel and debating the treatment of dysentry and when shears were first invented, has come up with a work of real originality that charms and puts a smile on the reader’s face as it does so. She’s already planning a sequel and on the strength of this one, it will be well worth looking out for.
‘A Moment in Time’ costs £8.50 and is available via Margot’s Books Facebook page where a donation of £2.50 will go to The Trussell Trust/Children In Need or visit: https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=margot%27s%20books
It’s also available on Amazon.
