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valkyrisms 's review for:
The Clockmaker's Daughter
by Kate Morton
Kate Morton came heavily recommended as someone looking to get into historical fiction, with a promise of an absolutely great literary style and lyrical voice. She definitely had both of those things, but that’s about where the positives of this book stop. Morton is wonderful when it comes to making words sounds beautiful and creating a sense of place, and considering one of the primary points of the novel is that a place can hold a sense of timeless beauty and belonging, I suppose her writing was in line with her theme. But there’s no amount of lush prose that can keep my interest in a novel when its plot and characters are lacking.
There are a great deal of details when it comes to characters, to the point where I was a little confused why I wasn’t connecting with any of them. We follow them through the most stressful experiences of their lives, often seeing them at their lowest points, their worries and sorrows spread out in a gorgeous prose for us to see, and yet I found that it was exceedingly hard to feel for them, or even to sum up any kind of of sympathy. The problem isn’t a lack of detail, but rather that we only see fragments of these characters without ever getting a chance to really know them. I expected this novel to center more on Elodie and her involvement with the story, a mystery driven by a unique connection, but instead we follow a series of characters and their history at the Birchwood Manor and spend little amount of time with them, jumping around from person to person. Is Elodie’s connection to Birchwood Manor really unique, among the faceless cast that rotate in and out of the house? How are we supposed to feel any kind of connection to her when the moment she begins to involve herself in the mystery the novel shoots away from her? I love the idea of an archivist as our protagonist, I loved the concept of a woman trapped by her dead mother’s legacy. I loved so many ideas about Elodie and this novel that seeing them all play out in such a lackluster fashion was immensely frustrating.
It’s incredibly hard to know or feel for any of the characters in the novel, as the second we become interested or attached the novel leaps away from them. There are characters that blur together because of similar problems; there are numerous people who all have the same guilt about their sibling being dead, regardless of the fact that they have little to do with their death, and reading about the same character archetype over and over doesn’t make for a theme, it’s just boring. There are moments of satisfaction: how the characters relate to one another over the years, faces we expected not to see again showing up, learning how various characters over the years ended up, but none of that would compare to actually seeing the characters develop and breathe on the page.
This leads to a problem with the plot. We barely get an idea of who Elodie is or why she is so interested in the items she uncovers before we leap to another perspective. So the mystery is never fully formed or realized; I actually had no idea what the mystery was supposed to be until more than three-quarters of the way through the book, and had lost any real interest in the novel far beforehand. The novel is supposed to center around the death of a woman and a robbery, yet because none of the characters were emotionally invested in these issues, I wasn’t either. I literally had no idea we were supposed to care about the missing heirloom until close to the end. Why should I? None of the characters cared about it, there was no search or inquiries made, no interesting theories proposed. It seemed like Morton gave us an idea of a mystery and expected us to care suddenly and deeply about it. The second mystery of the dead woman was only marginally more interesting; murder can only get you so far when the person murdered is an extraneous side character with no personality and little page time. The final mystery of the disappeared woman was hardly a mystery at all: we discover she’s dead so early on I don’t even consider it a spoiler, and the cause of her death is shoehorned in at the end in a really nonsense way.
I was really disappointed by this novel and in Morton, who has such a stellar reputation for historical fiction. Obviously, the cover is gorgeous. The writing style has immense potential and the setting of Birchwood Manor did feel vivid and alive. But when a novel falters and dies on both plot and character development, it’s almost impossible to resuscitate.
There are a great deal of details when it comes to characters, to the point where I was a little confused why I wasn’t connecting with any of them. We follow them through the most stressful experiences of their lives, often seeing them at their lowest points, their worries and sorrows spread out in a gorgeous prose for us to see, and yet I found that it was exceedingly hard to feel for them, or even to sum up any kind of of sympathy. The problem isn’t a lack of detail, but rather that we only see fragments of these characters without ever getting a chance to really know them. I expected this novel to center more on Elodie and her involvement with the story, a mystery driven by a unique connection, but instead we follow a series of characters and their history at the Birchwood Manor and spend little amount of time with them, jumping around from person to person. Is Elodie’s connection to Birchwood Manor really unique, among the faceless cast that rotate in and out of the house? How are we supposed to feel any kind of connection to her when the moment she begins to involve herself in the mystery the novel shoots away from her? I love the idea of an archivist as our protagonist, I loved the concept of a woman trapped by her dead mother’s legacy. I loved so many ideas about Elodie and this novel that seeing them all play out in such a lackluster fashion was immensely frustrating.
It’s incredibly hard to know or feel for any of the characters in the novel, as the second we become interested or attached the novel leaps away from them. There are characters that blur together because of similar problems; there are numerous people who all have the same guilt about their sibling being dead, regardless of the fact that they have little to do with their death, and reading about the same character archetype over and over doesn’t make for a theme, it’s just boring. There are moments of satisfaction: how the characters relate to one another over the years, faces we expected not to see again showing up, learning how various characters over the years ended up, but none of that would compare to actually seeing the characters develop and breathe on the page.
This leads to a problem with the plot. We barely get an idea of who Elodie is or why she is so interested in the items she uncovers before we leap to another perspective. So the mystery is never fully formed or realized; I actually had no idea what the mystery was supposed to be until more than three-quarters of the way through the book, and had lost any real interest in the novel far beforehand. The novel is supposed to center around the death of a woman and a robbery, yet because none of the characters were emotionally invested in these issues, I wasn’t either. I literally had no idea we were supposed to care about the missing heirloom until close to the end. Why should I? None of the characters cared about it, there was no search or inquiries made, no interesting theories proposed. It seemed like Morton gave us an idea of a mystery and expected us to care suddenly and deeply about it. The second mystery of the dead woman was only marginally more interesting; murder can only get you so far when the person murdered is an extraneous side character with no personality and little page time. The final mystery of the disappeared woman was hardly a mystery at all: we discover she’s dead so early on I don’t even consider it a spoiler, and the cause of her death is shoehorned in at the end in a really nonsense way.
I was really disappointed by this novel and in Morton, who has such a stellar reputation for historical fiction. Obviously, the cover is gorgeous. The writing style has immense potential and the setting of Birchwood Manor did feel vivid and alive. But when a novel falters and dies on both plot and character development, it’s almost impossible to resuscitate.