Books : The Forgotten Garden

Rating: - A Big Yawn
Thankfully, I found this book in a charity shop, so I didn't feel too peeved when it proved to be a dreadfully irritating read. With a writing style and storyline more akin to the the efforts you'd expect from a student who was part way through a creative writing course - Morton's book is predictable, banal, hodgepodge. Now don't laugh - I also bought The House At Riverton at the same time - well it was going cheap! I started it this week, (in sheer desperation, as I'd read everything in my book stash), but I think it may go unfinished. After enduring another chapter last night, I was losing the will to live. For a simple, well told, story I can recommend a book I've just read - The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd - utter magic!

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Rating: - Interesting Mystery Suffers from Length
This is a good story about a family mystery that is unravelled through the perspective of different characters at different points in time.

It was just a little too long though. Parts of the book aimed at drawing out the suspense killed it for me (a character just about to spill the beans on part of the mystery is interrupted by 2 pages of comments about a seafood dish...annoying!).

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Rating: - Do Not Buy This Book, unless......
you are prepared to set your alarm 15 mins early to delve into another two pages, carry it with you to read on the train, half hour at lunchtime and well into the night. In other words: you cannot put it down. Admittedly, you need to perserver with the first couple of chapters; but then you're hooked.

It is a spellbinding story interwoven with fairytales mirroring the main character's (Eliza's) and the other characters lives. You enter the world of Nell, Cassandra, Rose, Adeline and of course Eliza and travel back and forth through the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. It is all there,mystery, intrigue, spoiled beauty, envy, avarice, good an evil, the search for closure and coming home. It is beautifully written. Kate Morton has honed her craft to perfection at a very early age. Her characters are fully rounded, her prose delicious and her descriptions ('He was a scribble of a man')memorable. An utter delight!

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Rating: - Absolutely mesmerising...perfect!
I had read Kate Morton's first book, The House at Riverton, last year and didn't particularly like it, so what prompted me to pick this one up I don't know. But how glad I am that I did so. This is a fantastic, wonderful book that as someone else said, you just want to curl up with on a cold winter night and lose yourself in it. I absolutely adored it. It's not the kind of book I normally read, but maybe that made it all the better for me. The mystery in it is intriguing, and the moving from one period in time to another keeps it all moving along nicely. At 645 pages, it isn't a single page too long, in fact I am really sad to have finished it because I feel sure that whatever I read next cannot possibly live up to this book. One of the best I have read in a long time. Magnificent.

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Rating: - The Forgotten Gareden - Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

Perfect, perfect, perfect! It's books like this that make people fall in love with the written word...............