The Forgotten Garden

Book No: 28
Title: The Forgotten Garden
Author: Kate Morton
Genre: Fiction
Completed: 6/14/09
No. of Pages: 560
Rating: 4/5*****

The Forgotten Garden is a long, sprawling mystery that spans over 100 years, loaded with Gothic undertones. We have a spooky old Victorian mansion, an overgrown maze, a derelict cottage on a cliff, a forgotten garden, wealth, poverty, love, betrayal, good and evil all wrapped around an abandoned child.

Told through the perspectives of three women, Nell who is found when she is four years old, abandoned on a dock in Australia, with very sparse clues to her identity; Eliza who is the mysterious Authoress whom Nell vaguely remembers and whose book of fairy Tales is in Nell’s tiny suitcase and Cassandra, Nell’s granddaughter, who tries to put together all the pieces of the puzzle after her grandmother’s death.

I really enjoyed this story, I enjoy multi-generational family sagas and I found this one to be absorbing and well written and I liked the mystery and all the introduction of little clues. The changes in the perspectives could get a little confusing at times, and it would be hard to leave one story that was really getting interesting, to be taken back to another time and place but after a while I got accustomed to that. The best part of the book were the fairy tales written by The Authoress, lovely but spooky stories that all have clues to the mystery of Nell’s identity. I also enjoyed Ms. Morton’s inclusion of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a minor character, an obvious tip of the hat to the author of The Secret Garden, which clearly inspired portions of this book.

I didn’t care for the male characters in the book, they all seemed ephemeral and weak, but I’ve read many a book where the women were relegated to the background, so it didn’t really spoil my enjoyment of this book. Overall a very good read.