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A review by iamhereforthebooks
The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton
2.0
ARC kindly provided by Pan MacMillan via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!
This is my fourth Kate Morton book, and just by reading the first chapter I could totally tell that this was a Kate Morton book. I took this to be a good thing at first, as I had loved her style in her previous works, but unfortunately it also meant that this was almost a carbon copy of her other stories: the themes, the structure, the writing itself… as I was reading The Clockmaker's Daughter I felt that I had already read this book before.
I had two major issues with the book: the pace and the multiple POVs. I don't mind reading 600 pages if all of them (or at least most of them) are relevant to the story, but I honestly think that this book could have been 300 pages long and nothing major would have changed. This obviously affected the pace massively, and I was frequently annoyed because every time things picked up the POV would change (usually with a time jump associated) and we were back to endless descriptions of the house where everything happens and its surroundings. This takes me to my second issue: here we have no less than 8 different POVs, and I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. All of them add to the clockmaker's daughter's story, but they all have their own secondary stories too, and rather than enrich the book they dragged it endlessly. Plus, most of them were underdeveloped, especially towards the end, which felt rather insulting because after reading about all these people for what felt like ages I wanted to know what had happened / was going to happen with them, but all their endings were rushed and most of them quite stretched so they would play their part in the main story regardless of how little sense they made.
The writing though was nearly flawless, rich and evocative. The characters were not very relatable, but they were still likeable for the most part. I should probably had been more shocked and saddened by the ending but at that point so many things had happened to the protagonist that I was kind of desensitized to her tragedies, and that definitely rested impact to the last part.
In summary, hardcore Kate Morton fans will probably love this, but if you're looking for a book to discover Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden still remains her best work in my opinion.
This is my fourth Kate Morton book, and just by reading the first chapter I could totally tell that this was a Kate Morton book. I took this to be a good thing at first, as I had loved her style in her previous works, but unfortunately it also meant that this was almost a carbon copy of her other stories: the themes, the structure, the writing itself… as I was reading The Clockmaker's Daughter I felt that I had already read this book before.
I had two major issues with the book: the pace and the multiple POVs. I don't mind reading 600 pages if all of them (or at least most of them) are relevant to the story, but I honestly think that this book could have been 300 pages long and nothing major would have changed. This obviously affected the pace massively, and I was frequently annoyed because every time things picked up the POV would change (usually with a time jump associated) and we were back to endless descriptions of the house where everything happens and its surroundings. This takes me to my second issue: here we have no less than 8 different POVs, and I'm sure I'm forgetting someone. All of them add to the clockmaker's daughter's story, but they all have their own secondary stories too, and rather than enrich the book they dragged it endlessly. Plus, most of them were underdeveloped, especially towards the end, which felt rather insulting because after reading about all these people for what felt like ages I wanted to know what had happened / was going to happen with them, but all their endings were rushed and most of them quite stretched so they would play their part in the main story regardless of how little sense they made.
The writing though was nearly flawless, rich and evocative. The characters were not very relatable, but they were still likeable for the most part. I should probably had been more shocked and saddened by the ending but at that point so many things had happened to the protagonist that I was kind of desensitized to her tragedies, and that definitely rested impact to the last part.
In summary, hardcore Kate Morton fans will probably love this, but if you're looking for a book to discover Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden still remains her best work in my opinion.