The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

I won't follow my previous method of reviewing books- it was too complicated. But I would still like to talk about the most recent book I've read, "The Distant Hours". I'd read Kate Morton's two previous books: "The Forgotten Garden" and "The House at Riverton" and was excited to read her most recent novel.

The plot is as follows: Thirty-something Edith is a publisher living in London who begins to delve into her mother's secretive past. She discovers that her mother had been evacuated from London during the air raids in 1941 and had stayed at an old castle in the countryside. The inhabitants of the castle were the old Raymond, a former brilliant author who has gone mad; Percy, a twin whose love for the castle outshines anything else; Saffy, who longs to leave the castle for London but cannot leave her twin behind; and Juniper, the youngest sister by 20 years, a brilliant but crazed author who has terrible secrets to hide. As Edith digs deeper into the past, she uncovers all the long-hidden secrets of Milderhurst Castle.

Unfortunately, this book could not even begin to compare to the first two books by Kate Morton. There are a few simple reasons for this.

The author has my writing style. That is to say, she writes overly long, complicated sentences in a free-flowing thought-like way. It's not all that pleasant to read. I don't recall her having this issue in her other books. It almost feels like she wrote this book as a diary and then slapped it on the shelves to sell. It just feels sloppily written.

It is unimaginative! The first two books relied heavily on plot twists to make their narratives worthwhile. Perhaps the problem was that I was expecting the plot twist in this one and so I began to guess early on what had happened. And I guessed right. And then there were 300 pages yet to read. To be fair, the actual plot twist wasn't even as daring and grandiose and the author wanted it to be. It was actually a little disappointing.

The book is too long. You could shorten it by about 200 pages and it would be a much better read. There was too much unimportant information for the book to hold my attention. Indeed, this book has been sitting on my nightstand for months now.

Now for the redeeming quality of the novel: Simply that I have a penchant for historical fiction... I enjoy the settings that this author portrays- and she does have a fabulous imagination. (Though the characters in this book also had weak and single-minded, somewhat unbelievable motivations as well.)

All in all, I did LIKE the book, but I certainly didn't love it. Would I recommend it to my mother or my friends? Eh, probably not. I would much rather recommend "The Forgotten Garden" or a dozen other books I've read and enjoyed recently. This one wasn't terrible- but it just doesn't warrant my attention for any longer than it takes me to finish this blog post.

Onward and upward!