Book #7: The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

One problem I have is never having any good ideas for books--I don't know how to tell whether I'm going to like a book or whether it's something I want to read any more. I don't want to waste my time reading something that's going to turn out to be trashy or stupid. I need to find some good reading blogs that can give me recommendations! But anyways, when my friend Chelsea was here, she recommended this book to me, so I immediately requested it from the library and plowed through it in the last few days.

I couldn't put the book down. It was the story of a woman searching for her ancestry/family after she finds out she was actually a stowaway who'd been discovered at the age of 4 and adopted by a new family where she'd landed, but the cool thing about the book is that every chapter is told by a different narrator--past or present--and at a different time period. Sometimes the woman's ancestors (who she's trying to figure out about) talk, and we hear their stories, and sometimes the woman's granddaughter talks about her adventures trying to figure out the whole mystery (because nobody's ever truly figured it out until after the woman dies). I really liked the changing narrator and time periods because it really did seem like a mystery of a sort. I also liked the style of the book--the writing was good enough that it didn't ever distract me from what was being written about, if that makes sense.

My only complaints were these: that I figured out what the plot twist was going to be before it happened, and that some of the "discoveries" the granddaughter makes to help put the pieces of the puzzle together seem mighty unlikely and convenient to have actually happened. I'm not someone who usually figures out things before they happen, but I managed to in this book, and I think that's maybe a sign that it was a little too obvious. And it kind of bugged me that the granddaughter just "happened" to keep finding answers to these seemingly impossible questions right at the right moment--they reach a final stopping point, where there doesn't seem there can be any more possible answers, and then someone delivers a letter to her that had being held for her grandmother for the last thirty years. She happens to meet someone who happened to work with her grandmother's mother and who knew the whole big secret that no one else in the world knew and is the key to the whole mystery. Really? Just doesn't seem quite believable to me. But I guess you need to have stuff like that happen or else the mystery would have been very unsatisfying and never resolved.