Right here, in this very paragraph I want to give you some kind of warning about spoilers but the truth is I only want to give you enough information about the book so that you'll want to go and read it yourself because I loved it. I was totally sucked in by everything about it. Every once in a while you'll read a book and it makes you feel like you are finally breathing fresh air and this book made my lungs smile.
The main idea of the plot is that a young woman receives and inheritance from her grandmother and with it comes a strange looking key. From there you are thrust into what I'm going to call a braided plot: where there are three plots that are woven together to make an overall plot. Hopefully that makes sense.
You follow the lives of three women, each of them in a different era, and learn about them and their lives, you see them grow and what causes them despair. And Kate Morton's writing pulls you along in this mystery and pulls at your heart strings as well. She also was able to write it so that I couldn't solve the mystery half way through! I wasn't even sure that what I was putting together in my head to solve the mystery was right until it was written out plainly. I love being stumped.
A synopsis of the book and more of Morton's writings can be found here: http://www.katemorton.com/the-forgotten-garden/
All in all it is a book that I would definitely re-read and suggest for people to read. At anytime. It doesn't matter if they were looking for something else because I would just drop it into the conversation casually, "Oh you're looking for sci-fi? Hmmm... how about a not sci-fi called The Forgotten Garden?"
The Wakeful Dreamer