I finished reading Kate Morton’s novel The Forgotten Garden some time last week, but I haven’t had a chance to review it. The novel is a multi-generational saga about secrets. As the novel begins, Cassandra is mourning the death of the grandmother who raised her, and she discovers her grandmother has left her a cottage in Cornwall. Astonished to discover her grandmother had ever even been to Cornwall, much less bought property there, she begins to investigate and discovers her grandmother was put on a ship when she was a small child, apparently abandoned or kidnapped, and wound up in Australia, where she was adopted by the man who found her. When Nell, the grandmother, discovers she is adopted, she searches for her lost origins, but life events prevent her from rooting out the truth. Cassandra takes up her grandmother’s search and returns to the Forgotten Garden surrounding the cottage her grandmother bought in Cornwall.

First, I should say I was expecting this book to be creepy—a sort of ghost story. I can’t fault it for not meeting that expectation. I have been wanting to find a really good creepy book like Rebecca or The Little Stranger. If you have recommendations, please share. I am still in R. I. P. Challenge mode. I failed to read the number of books I wanted to, but I’m still looking. Bonus points if you find me one set in Ireland.

That said, it was a good story. I thought I figured out what happened to Nell halfway through the book, and then the author threw in a curve ball, and I thought I was wrong, but then it turned out I had been right all along. That bothered me a little bit. I did like the setting, and the characters were engaging. The story was told well, and I wanted to find out what happened.

I do think it was a little overlong. I do not complain about long books, but this one could have been trimmed to tighten the plot. I liked Eliza Makepeace, but I didn’t care for her cousin Rose, and I had a hard time understanding why Eliza liked her so much. She was spoiled. She wasn’t as nasty as her evil mother or father, but she wasn’t awesome, either, and Eliza’s devotion to her is weird. Of course, who else did Eliza have?

There was a really, really interesting mystery at the center of the novel that involved Eliza’s mother and her brother, Linus, and that mystery never did get unequivocally resolved. I have my theory, but I would rather the book made the reveal more explicit. Similarly, some hints are thrown out about the connection between Nell’s adopted family and a Cornwall family with connections to the Mountrachet family, but none of the characters make these connections, so it remains an unexplored thread (and perhaps too coincidental, given the distance we’re talking, but it’s still interesting enough to explore).

I am struggling with a rating, but I’m going to go with 4 stars, despite some flaws, because it did hold together enough for me to turn pages and look forward to reading it, but I could completely understand anyone who gave it 3 stars. I might have also, if it hadn’t been set in Cornwall and had Jack the Ripper references.