The Forgotten Garden
Having greatly enjoyed Kate Morton’s debut novel, ‘The House at Riverton’, earlier in the year, I was greatly excited a few months back when Babel very kindly bought me a copy of her second; ‘The Forgotten Garden’. It being quite a large book, I didn’t get around to starting it for some weeks, but when I was packing to go to Szombathely it struck me that it would be an ideal book to bring. No one wants to read something too heavy when they are on holiday, and whilst the size of the paperback meant it was actually quite heavy for packing, nevertheless I knew the content would be pretty light. The upside of the size meant I thought it would probably last me all week, although I did take the precaution of packing a few other books in case it turned out to be horrendously bad 
Of course, it didn’t The novel tells the story of an elderly Australian lady, who on her 21st birthday discovers that the people she has thought of as her parents are not, in fact, her parents. At the age of 5, she was taken from her English home and placed on a ship to Australia by a mysterious lady who she knew only as “The Authoress”. The Authoress told her to hide in a dark part of the ship and indicated that she would be back later to fetch her, but she never reappeared and the little girl arrived in Australia several weeks later with nothing except a small suitcase containing a book of illustrated fairy tales. She was found by a kindly worker at the port whose wife was having problems conceiving, and he took her home with him and brought her up as his own daughter.
This happened at the turn of the century, and many years later the now elderly Nell decides to travel to Britain to try to uncover her past. She traces her ancestors to a particular stately home in Cornwall and is so taken with the area that she purchases a cottage on the estate with the intention of moving there permanently. When she returns to Australia on a brief visit to sort out her affairs, however, she is confronted by her wayward daughter who dumps her grandchild Cassandra in her care and runs off with her latest lover.
Nell decides to do her duty and be a parent to Cassandra, and the first the girl knows of her grandmother’s past is in 2005 when the old lady dies and Cassandra is left the cottage in her will. Having lived through some fairly troubled times of her own recently, Cassandra travels to England also and attempts to decipher her grandmother’s past. She knows that there is some sort of dreadful secret associated with the cottage, but no one seems prepared to tell her what. She is fairly confident that she has found out the identity of Nell’s parents, even if she cannot understand why the Authoress, a family friend, would have kidnapped her. But all is not as it seems, and when Cassandra finally uncovers the true identity of Nell’s mother, the whole mystery begins to unravel.
This was a pleasant book, which was fun to read It didn’t grab me quite as much as ‘The House at Riverton’ did, though I’m not sure I can explain why. I didn’t identify with the characters as much, I guess, and despite the fact that parts of this book are undoubtedly sad, it failed to reduce me to tears so I can’t categorise it as being quite in the same league. It was easy to read though, and I certainly finished it in record time; it took the entire week, but given that I read for at most an hour a day and that there were well over 400 pages, that seems pretty quick At times it was a little confusing, because the action kept switching between different periods and locations, but on the whole I managed to keep up and it all contributed to building the suspense. Unfortunately I think I saw the final twist a couple of chapters before I was supposed to have seen it, which probably ruined the effect slightly, but all in all I would say that it is an excellent book which I would thoroughly recommend
Tags: Books, kate morton, the forgotten garden