“The Forgotten Garden” by Kate Morton – The Buried Life

Kate Morton, the author of the New York Times bestseller, The House at Riverton, returns once again with a novel centered on the rediscovery of a long lost past in The Forgotten Garden. This time around, we follow the life Nell, a small girl who had been raised by a dock master and his wife after being abandoned on a ship headed for Australia. 

On her twenty-first birthday, Nell’s foster parents reveal her true identity, or at least what they know about it. This discovery prompts Nell to undertake a very emotional journey back to her roots, back to Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish Coast where the Mountrachet family buried their secrets.

However, Nell has never really succeeded in assembling all the pieces of the puzzle, something her granddaughter, Cassandra, aims to rectify, hopefully finding that coveted secret garden, as beautiful as in the fairy tale book Nell never parted with since being abandoned on that ship almost a century ago.

First of all, those expecting the story to mainly be a mystery about the past Nell’s family has hidden, then I’m sorry to disappoint you; even though the mystery does play a big part, this book seems to be more about character development in a relatively historically-accurate context. We are taken back and forth through time and space as our characters from past and present go on their own investigations of the same subject. All for the sake of putting together the picture of the past Nell has forgotten about herself.

One of the few drawbacks to this book was the length of the story. While I do understand that descriptions and seemingly-trivial events are necessary from time to time, I found that there were simply too many inconsequential and, from a practical perspective, useless passages in those 650 pages of text.

The information which is truly relevant to the story (i.e. the clues to Nell’s past) is spread out somewhat thinly throughout the book, with some of the events in between them even feeling like filler content, although that thought only popped once into my head (I can see how for other people it would pop up more often).

Besides that though, I found the story to be a fantastic one, something akin to a darker and more realistic fairy tale, one on which no happy endings are guaranteed. Most of the characters are quite interesting, although it has to be said that a few of them ought to cut it down on the drama, especially when you consider they exist in a time far less sensitive to death, war and violence than ours. 

However, the patient readers out there who are willing to take the time in order to completely immerse themselves into a fantastic journey through time and space will find the book to be more than satisfying, and the answers it provides to be rather juicy. 

All in all, I’d recommend this book to anyone who isn't afraid of a long read which, in order to be truly enjoyed, requires the reader to remain patient, forget everything and immerse him or herself into a fantastic world of mysteries and seemingly-endless possibilities.

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Kate Morton Personal site Kate Morton is an author hailing from Australia who has enjoyed local and international success with her writings, with some of her more respected books including The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours. She often made the bestseller lists in the UK and locally, and her novels have already been published in more than 38 countries.