The Forgotten Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: fairy queen, maze gates, white suitcase, Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden, Miss Eliza (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: Like Frances Hodgson Burnett's beloved classic The Secret Garden, Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden takes root in your imagination and grows into something enchanting--from a little girl with no memories left alone on a ship to Australia, to a fog-soaked London river bend where orphans comfort themselves with stories of Jack the Ripper, to a Cornish sea heaving against wind-whipped cliffs, crowned by an airless manor house where an overgrown hedge maze ends in the walled garden of a cottage left to rot. This hidden bit of earth revives barren hearts, while the mysterious Authoress's fairy tales (every bit as magical and sinister as Grimm's) whisper truths and ignite the imaginary lives of children. As Morton draws you through a thicket of secrets that spans generations, her story could cross into fairy tale territory if her characters weren't clothed in such complex flesh, their judgment blurred by the heady stench of emotions (envy, lust, pride, love) that furtively flourished in the glasshouse of Edwardian society. While most ache for a spotless mind's eternal sunshine, the Authoress meets the past as "a cruel mistress with whom we must all learn to dance," and her stories gift children with this vital muscle memory. --Mari Malcolm

From Booklist

In 1913, a little girl arrives in Brisbane, Australia, and is taken in by a dockmaster and his wife. She doesn’t know her name, and the only clue to her identity is a book of fairy tales tucked inside a white suitcase.  When the girl, called Nell, grows up, she starts to piece together bits of her story, but just as she’s on the verge of going to England to trace the mystery to its source, her grandaughter, Cassandra, is left in her care. When Nell dies, Cassandra finds herself the owner of a cottage in Cornwall, and makes the journey to England to finally solve the puzzle of Nell’s origins. Shifting back and forth over a span of nearly 100 years, this is a sprawling, old-fashioned novel, as well-cushioned as a Victorian country house, replete with family secrets, stories-within-stories, even a maze and a Dickensian rag-and-bone shop. All the pieces don’t quite mesh, but it’s a satisfying read overall, just the thing for readers who like multigenerational sagas with a touch of mystery. --Mary Ellen Quinn

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1ST edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416550542
• ISBN-13: 978-1416550549
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (175 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #801 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #9 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Australia & New Zealand
  #57 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical
  #82 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

223 of 231 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Forgotten Garden: Another Blockbuster for Kate Morton, July 26, 2008

By	Phyllis Staff (Dallas, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Forgotten Garden (Paperback)

A four-year-old girl waits alone on a dock in Australia for parents who never come. Her only possession? A tiny white suitcase containing no information about who she is or how she came to be abandoned.

Nell is a foundling, and what a rare foundling she is. A stow-away on an ocean liner, she refuses to tell even so much as her name. Until in her 60s, over-protected by a loving foster father, she has no clue how she came to be alone on that dock. Hers is the mystery that unfolds in this long novel spanning more than a century, five generations, and two distant continents.

Enthusiastic fans of Kate Morton's first novel, "The House at Riverton," will thrill to her second, "The Forgotten Garden." Like her first, this is a novel whose female characters are finely and fully drawn, and whose males are wispy and insubstantial. How its women interact, how they love and hate one another, how their interplay moves through tragedy and redemption will provide hours of pleasure for her fans.

Morton's excellent pacing creates a page-turner that is hard to put down, although its length might give pause to those who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. Morton tells her story not only through the actions of her characters but also through fairy tales that work on several levels and provide clues to the mystery's final solution. Many readers will have guessed the solution long before the end of the book. Nevertheless, Morton maintains reader interest throughout.

Overall, this is a highly satisfying read. It's fun to watch the author weave the lives of women into a rich tapestry of life and love, anger and betrayal. However, the novel is not without its weaknesses. First, as mentioned above, Morton's male characters are weak and insipid and never come to life. Second, the love interest at the end of the book does not mesh with the rest of the work. It is almost as though an editor said, "You'd better add a little love story here," so Morton did.

The book's flaws, while mildly unsettling, are not serious enough to spoil a great read. If you enjoy long stories about generations of women, you will love "The Forgotten Garden."

108 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fairy tale gone wrong, October 5, 2008

By	Baking Enthusiast "Liza" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Forgotten Garden (Paperback)

I was a bit hesitant in picking up "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton. After my disappointment with "The House at Riverton," I wasn't sure if I was willing to invest more time. Pleased to say that the story hooked me from the get-go, and though the book is longer than I thought necessary, it was altogether an entertaining read.

At the heart of this big, fat tale (645 pages) is a mystery. In 1913, a dock master, Hugh, discovers a four-year-old girl who's been left alone on a wharf in Queensland, Australia after all passengers had disembarked from a boat that sailed from England. Taking pity on her, Hugh takes her home to his wife, Lil. In spite of Hugh's and Lil's efforts to find the girl's family, time passes and no one claims the tyke. Having hit her head while onboard the boat, the little girl couldn't even remember her own name and all she could recall was a woman she calls the Authoress who was supposed to sail with her. Hugh and Lil decide to keep her as their own and name her Nell.

In the present day, Nell's granddaughter, Cassandra, is grieving Nell's passing. As she goes through Nell's notebooks, she realizes that her grandmother had never stopped searching for her true parents. Cassie takes over the search, which leads her to England and to a small Cornish village, and finally, to a decrepit cottage and its walled garden...a garden that swallowed the secrets of the 1900s and buried within its grounds the fascinating and tragic story of the Mountrachets and the woman a child had called the Authoress.

A challenge to the reader will be the constant switching of perspective from past to present and in between, primarily the years of 1913, 1975 and 2005. It's a bit off-putting in the first few chapters but after awhile, it's no longer an encumbrance. Though the main story is Nell's parentage, the novel is dense with stories of the characters whose lives intersect and create the environment upon which Nell's birth and subsequent abandonment hinges. There are also many incidental details that don't necessarily impact the story but are included nevertheless to bring alive the era being depicted and add realism to the backstories. Included, too, are fairy tales by the Authoress that serve as allegories of the truths secreted by the doomed Mountrachet family, a family that "wanted things they shouldn't or couldn't have" and destroyed lives with their avarice, entitlements and perversions.

It can be a grueling read at close to 700 pages but the mystery itself kept me reading and speculating. Clues are parceled out in small doses and it takes a very long time, almost the end, before one can put together a clear picture of Nell's history. That's a good decision on the author's part as otherwise, a reader's interest would likely wane quickly. As Cassie puts it, "the closer we get, the more tangled the web becomes."

The characters are, for the most part, very interesting, though a bit on the melodramatic side, but it's the kind of melodrama that befits the Victorian era and the early 1900s. Of particular note is the emerging technology of x-ray in the mid-1890s, the careless use of which put into motion a series of tragic events that would reverberate for over 100 years.

It's an enthralling read and, with patience from a reader, delivers very satisfactory answers. Stories about foundlings, secrets and Victorian women have been done hundreds of times in various iterations and can get tiresome fast if the core story is weak. Glad to say that no such error is committed in "The Forgotten Garden." The first few chapters pulled me in very quickly and I found myself compulsively on the same quest for the truth. The mystery has sturdy legs that don't weaken for the novel's entire duration.

73 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sweet, But Far Too Long and Confusing, April 8, 2009

By	Addison Dewitt "I'm nobody's fool." (out there, in the dark) - See all my reviews

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The basic core story for this novel is very good, but the writer's treatment can be somewhat confusing. I found myself flipping back and forth to keep track of various characters and events. Without giving away too much (remember, readers, this is not supposed to be a book report or synopsis!) there are three generations of women, two of whom go back to England from Australia to figure out their origins and history. The author chose to skip around in the time line and while that in itself is a good plan, the style in which she does this can be somewhat confusing. The mystery is held together until the last but the interspersing of "fairy tales" into the mix and the fractured style of the timeline is all a bit overreaching and serve to weaken the story instead of making it stronger.

Overall, I felt this would be a good book for teenage girls to read as they would probably relate to the characters more than I could, being a 50 year old man. It is well written and the characters are very fleshed out and rememberable, which is far more than I could say for many novels today. The writer's descriptions are cinematic in places and it's easy to see how this book might translate into a movie script. I just hope that if this were to happen, the filmmakers don't slice it up too much with a ton of flashbacks like the authoress here has done.