I especially liked the nature writing in At Hawthorn Time, and gradually came to care about the characters, and worried for what was going to happen at the end. But I'm also not sure it needed its beginning (a car crash) and its ending (who is in the car crash). It's a quiet book, and perhaps it would have worked better for me if it had stayed that way.
I also wasn't sure about some of the internal voices of the characters (lots of cliches), which sometimes were hard to distinguish from each other.
But a solid, nice read.