Skip This One, Girls! Kate Morton Is No Kate Atkinson!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                    This was such a frustrating experience, girls, because it has all the formulae that presses my buttons--a gloomy, Gothic manse in Victorian England, London during the period, great, atmospheric descriptions, ghosts, precocious children.....this should have been a dream read!

                                      Instead, it was like slogging through a swamp.  While, to her credit, Morton has steeped herself in Victorian literature, she fails to do what someone like Dickens does--connect all the character threads together.  It is clear she was going for a combine of "Great Expectations," "Jane Eyre," and "Oliver Twist."  She fancies herself as skilled as these works' authors--far from it.

                                        The title character is born Aribelle Kent.  She is the daughter of a widowed clockmaker. who soon falls on hard times, and abandons her, supposedly to go to America, where he says he will send for her.  Meanwhile, she is left with a Mrs. Mack, in London, a sort of female Fagin, and becomes an accomplished thief, but when her best friend, Lily Millington, dies, the girl, now called "Birdie," takes Lily's name, grows to great beauty, and falls into the life of artist Edward Radcliffe, who owns  Birchfield Manor.  Little sister Lucy has her eye on everything.

                                            In the present, an archivist named Elodie Winthrop, tries to unravel the mystery of a woman named Fanny Brown, which took place in the summer of 1862.  By then, Lily has become a great beauty, is dispatched to Birchwood Manor, and mysteriously vanishes after Fanny's murder.  Edward, more grieved by Lily's parting than Fanny's death, goes mad, and Lucy inherits, and lives, in the house.

                                              Then there is this woman Juliet, in the 1920's, with her children, whose place in all this made no sense to me.

                                                Good luck, readers, with unraveling all this.  The author couldn't.  Though, if you have read my post this far, maybe you have a chance.

                                                  The novel runs 482 pages, and I felt the burden of every one.  It could easily have had a hundred pages cut.  Not to mention it goes back and forth in time--past and present.  Like "Fried Green Tomatoes," the past sequences are the best.  Maybe if Morton had set it all there, she would have had a chance.

                                                    I took a big chance on this clunky novel, and lost.  I urge you to skip it, and Morton's other books, all of which I am sure as similar to this plot as their titles.

                                                     Stick to Mother Goose, and "Hickory Dickory Dock," girls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!