Rating: 2/5
I thought this book was a bit modern and not very well-written, though it had a perfectly reasonable plot. I thought that my favourite character, instead of Ashley, the main character, who was young and kind and pretty, was Miss Cooper, who was meant to be the reader’s least favourite. That protection was broken because I thought all of the characters were extremely boring, except Miss Cooper. All mean, horrible villains in books are very interesting, but then you tend to like them less because the heroes are also interesting and heroes are always better than villains. But in The Doll in the Garden, the heroes and the other characters were so boringly, unbelievably uninteresting that I chose horrible old Miss Cooper over Ashley and Kristi.
To cut a previously written long story short, I really did not like Downing Hahn’s way of writing. Her characters were boring and most of them had stupid names, like Ashley and Kristi, but also like the creepy ghost-cat which showed no shadow, which you might think would be called something like ‘Death Talon’, but was named ‘Snowball’.