Review: The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

If Beatrix Potter wrote mysteries, or family drama, the result would probably be much like Kate Morton's second novel, 'The Forgotten Garden'.

The expansive story opens in 1913 London, where a small girl is crouched alone, hiding on an ocean liner per the instructions of someone she knows only as 'The Authoress'. When the woman does not return as promised, the four year-old is forced to make the sea voyage alone, winding up in Australia without a clue as to who she is or why she's alone. She is adopted by a childless couple and named Nell, and forgets the issue entirely until the night of her twenty-first birthday, when her adoptive father makes the fateful decision, against the will of his deceased wife, to divulge the secret that her past is really a mystery to them all. Nell, feeling completely abandoned by both her perception of reality and her trust and faith in the concept of family, withdraws from her adoptive family and begins an entirely new life. Years later, when the man she had thought was her father dies, she receives a suitcase from his estate; it is the suitcase she had arrived with so long ago, and in it a path to her past. Nell then begins in earnest the search for her real past, a search which is eventually handed down to her granddaughter, Cassandra. The mystery takes them each back to London, to an estate and a family cursed with illness, paranoia, and murderous darkness.

The Forgotten Garden is a rich, enticing story told by several different people, in a multitude of times and places. Initially, this made it difficult for me to follow, but once new characters stopped being intruduced, and when the story took up a set cadence, it was easier for me to manage the ever-changing perspective, although keeping events and people straight in my head was still a slight challenge. Also peppered throughout the novel are short fairy tales, written by The Authoress, in which are woven the sad and sometimes frightening realities of her life, and which serve as clues for Nell, Cassandra, and the reader as we all try to close the circle of curiosities.

I liked ...Garden quite a bit. Not only is it a very satisfying mystery, but it moves along at a good pace and involves a good balance of good and evil; Morton does an excellent job of making the characters multi-dimensional, and trusts the reader to incorporate new character developments without either hitting you over the head with heavy-handed black-and-white descriptions of their personalities or rushing to solve things for you. I think that one of the signs of a good writer is the novelist's ability to restrain his- or herself and allow the readers time to figure out what's going on on their own before dealing the final blow, and Morton does this very well. She also does an excellent job of creating a mystery that reveals itself in layers, so even if you figure out the answer to one thing fairly early on, there are still so many other questions that you don't lose interest.

My only complaints are as follows: I would have liked more on both Nell's and Cassandra's relationship with Nell's daughter/Cassandra's mother. We hear from everyone's persepective but hers, and I think something more from or about her would have been interesting. Some of the descriptions were a little long, but skimmable, as were the fairy tales. Also, the introduction of Christian, the gardener, to Cassandra was a little convenient and seemed beneath the rest of the book.

Rating: 4.5 out of five stars - very good plot and characters, emotionally absorbing, a little over-descriptive