In The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, be prepared to experience a fair amount of disorientation as the action takes you both back and forward through time as well as across two continents. There are three narrators - Nell, Cassandra and Eliza - each are strong women, and each have suffered great loss. Cassandra is trying to finish the quest that her grandmother, Nell, started 25 years ago, a quest to find out who her real parents were and why she was put on a boat and then abandoned by a lady she knew as the Authoress when she was just four years old. After discovering Nell's journal and that her grandmother has left her a house in England she knew nothing about, Cassandra sets off for Cornwall too see it for herself. Slowly, but surely the lives of each of the three women are revealed, as well as how their lives are intertwined. As mentioned before, there is a heck of a lot of toing and froing, and you definitely need to keep your wits about you to avoid getting lost ... have just thought ... there is a maze which features heavily in the titular garden ... a coincidence ... I think not! Overall, this is a family saga, but tied up around a bit of a mystery. There are some strong characters, but I felt that the male characters, with the exception of one, were totally unsympathetic, which meant they didn't provide any depth. It is also overly long and could have done with some sympathetic editing to tighten up the flabby, repetitive parts. I also found one of the main events somewhat unbelievable. For such a long book, there were still a couple of loose threads left behind unless I managed to miss them in the maze! It is an easy enough read, good for a holiday (which is what I am on right now), but it didn't stimulate my mind in the way that it could have.
My STAR rating: THREE.
Length: 645 print pages.
Price I paid: free, borrowed from a friend.
Formats available: print; unabridged mp3 CD; unabridged audio download; ebook.
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