u/PrimroseWM

Hello! My family and I will be visiting London in a week. I'm a big Brambly Hedge fan and it looks like Epping Forest, where the Brambly Hedge Sculpture Trail is located, is about an hour away from where we are staying in Primrose Hill. An hour isn't bad, but as we will have 4 days in London (including the day we land early in the a.m.) with one of those days traveling to Hartfield to visit the Pooh Corner/100 Acre Wood area, I'm wondering if it's worth the half day or so on this particular trip? I would love to see it, but also don't want to be super rushed feeling. Thank you!

I thought I’d share a couple of book recommendations for when a diversion of Emma Lion is needed. They are both new-to-me books I recently read and enjoyed:

• The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery: of course, Anne of Green Gables is a favorite, but I’ve never read any of Montgomery’s other novels. This is a short, classic, brilliant story that I adored. It’s funny and the heroine is just amazingly fun to read. Very sweet love story that I think will only get better with future re-reads.
• Edenbrooke by Julianna Donaldson: this one is a bit cheesy, but it was a different kind of book for me and I had a blast reading it. The male lead character is the stuff daydreams are made of and I know I’ll return to it to re-read it, and one of my favorite book passages ever, in the future.

Edenbrooke did a great job of filling in the gap for the romance I so badly want to see with Emma and Islington. The hero is not Islington in style, but I do think the level of passion and depth of love would be equal, so it helped placate my disappointment that Emma and Islington are not happening (right now, maybe not ever, who knows!). 

Besides the fact that I can see Emma and Islington in it to win it for the long run, I think another big reason I want to see their love story is because I want to see Islington fall in love from Emma’s perspective - I want to see it all, not from some third party perspective. I want to see it all! What he does, what he says, how he looks, etc etc.

With that said, if Emma and Islington’s romance is not in the fates I think I’ll be okay with it (after all, Emma deserves to choose her other half of home on her own and who am I to deny that?), but I am going to need some really good fan fiction to fill in that gap, or I’ll be forever mourning! Ha. So, fiction writers please be prepared! 😂

edit to add: I wouldn’t necessarily want an alternative ending with Islington as Emma’s guy if that’s not how the story ends (though of course I’d read that too, ha). I’d just like to see Islington’s love story with some character in case it isn’t with Emma 🙂