Quick Book Reviews Blog

It seems that Kate Morton is someone who enjoys looking at long-forgotten pasts, or at least that’s the impression she gives in many of her novels, including The Forgotten Garden and The House at Riverton . In The Secret Keeper , she once again takes the same path, this time following the story of Laurel Nicholson, starting when she was sixteen years of age and living on a farm with her parents. One night, she notices a man speaking to her mother, and later witnesses a very shocking crime, and while she could potentially figure out what happened by herself, she never had the proof needed to make any definitive conclusions. 

It is September 1940, one of the most turbulent times in human history as a global conflict rages on, with Nazi Germany still seeming like an unstoppable war machine destined to crush all in their path. As a dog fight rages on in the skies above the Weald of Kent, the unspeakable happens as a twelve year-old, Queenie, witnesses an enemy plane crashing in the woods. Contrary to instinct, Queenie’s family takes in the injured pilot, hoping he would die of his wounds.  However, not only does he recover, but he also shows himself to be more than a simple brain-dead and mind-washed grunt, changing the family’s life forever. Fast forward to September 1959, and Queenie is a successful playwright in London. When she receives word that her father is dying, she undertakes a journey to come back to him, raising from the dead many harrowing memories, including ones of the German pilot.

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.

The House at Riverton is Kate Morton’s first effort at a novel, and it is one set in England between the World Wars, following Grace, a house servant to the aristocratic Hartford family who live in Riverton. The story is mostly told through a flashback in 1999, when Grace is almost a hundred years old and is asked by a young movie director to tell him the events of that house. As it turns out, life in the Riverton house was full of secrets an deception, especially when a young poet shot himself in 1924 during a social gathering, an even witnessed only by the Hartford family daughters and shared with Grace. Beneath all the layers of secrets Grace is trying to uncover, we get to see how quickly people change, and how life was in an era which isn’t very far from today, but feels like it happened eternities ago.