books by kate morton the forgotten garden

Nell's adoptive father finally dies in 1975, and only then does he send her the little white suitcase with the book of fairy tales. Then she lives the rest of her life in Brisbane, at some unspecified time marrying and having a daughter-apparently solely for the purpose of having a grand-daughter who can advance the plot. She breaks her engagement to the nice boy she was going to marry, and also refuses to tell him why. She withdraws from her sisters, but refuses to tell them why. He waited until she was 21 to tell her, and she gets all whiny and self-righteous about it. Nell did not remember anything about her life before Australia, and so she freaks out when her 'father' tells her about how he found her and took her home. Roughly the first third of the book establishes Nell's and Cassandra's lives in Brisbane, Australia, and boring lives they are. In the end, it is up to her granddaughter, Cassandra, to solve the mystery. In 1975, Nell travels to England to track down what clues she can about who she was before she ended up in Australia. Inside the case was a book of fairy tales written by Eliza Makepeace. The plot concerns the search for Nell's past she was found sitting alone on a wharf in Australia in 1913, with only a child's suitcase. The story follows three women through different time periods: Eliza from 1900-1913, Nell from 1975-76, and Cassandra in 2005. As an audio book, however, I was at the mercy of the narrator, and I basically suffered through every damn syllable of a book that would have benefitted from being cut down by at least a third, if not a full half. Perhaps if I had read it, I could have sped through some of the more tedious portions and had a different impression of it.

This is a book that I listened to, and that might be the reason this review is going to be so negative.

Books by kate morton the forgotten garden