I admit defeat. I could not get through this book. Believe me, I tried. But I could not. And I'll let you in on why.
There was a time where Kate Morton was one if not my only favorite author. The way she weaved through time periods, with family secrets spilling over onto future generations, it was just super entertaining and the kind of books I enjoyed getting lost in. Her first three novels, The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden and The Distant Hours, are my favorites. If I had to pick one novel as my absolute favorite, it would definitely be The Forgotten Garden. One of my all-time favorite books,
But around her fourth book, I started having a hard time getting through it. It could be entirely on me; maybe I just don't have the attention span or the patience or the diligence to read a story that's 400+ pages and shifts through different time periods. It sounds exhausting to read when I put it that way, but I never once felt like that when reading, say, The Forgotten Garden. Sure, it wasn't a book that I blew threw in a week, it took time to get through and fully appreciate and there's nothing wrong with that. But Morton's fourth book, The Secret Keeper, was very hard for me to get through. Took me months. But I guess I could say it was worth it, because I absolutely loved the ending (among Morton's best, I think) and I think it makes up for all the slow-moving parts in the middle. So, when I started to encounter some of those parts in The Lake House, I told myself to keep powering through, it has to get better. It's Kate Morton, after all. But I just couldn't.
The Lake House's premise is quite different from Morton's previous novels. Sure, it has the same formula; a mysterious family from the 1900s, an idyllic house, and something that went hidden for decades. But the key difference between The Lake House and Morton's other books is that the person trying to figure out the mystery, a police detective named Sadie Sparrow, has no relation to the family whatsoever. She's just a cop, in turmoil from a recent case, who decides she has to find out what happened. Okay, but that wasn't the dealbreaker. What made me dislike The Lake House more and more was the plotting. The mystery goes that the baby of the Edevane family, Theo, went missing at the family's Midsummer party at their estate, Loeanneth; the case went cold and the house went abandoned. All we have is this incessant foreshadowing that one of Theo's sisters, Alice, might have had something to do with it. In a typical Morton novel, the chapters range from one time period to the next. All we seem to have in The Lake House is chapters that go back to the parents' meeting, or to the night or days leading up to Theo's disappearance. It just got so boring. There was no multi-faceted cast of characters, just the family whose baby brother went missing and some cop who becomes invested in the story. The Lake House did not remind me of the Kate Morton I fell in love with.
To compare, let's take my favorite, The Forgotten Garden. In that story, it follows a granddaughter trying to find out where her grandmother, Nell, came from after her death. Meanwhile, several chapters are written from Nell's perspective as she tries to discover where she came from decades prior when she was alive. We see two generations uncovering a mystery at different stages in life, meanwhile, a very interesting mystery developing itself through other characters in a different time period. The Lake House has none of that and seems like an unoriginal mystery in comparison. I also noticed a lot of similarities in character details from other previous Morton novels, which to me just seems recycled and tragically uncreative.
So, I didn't get through The Lake House. Maybe I'll return to it some day to find out what happened to that baby, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll just stare at the cover, which is very aesthetically pleasing, and pretend its pages hold a different mystery that is much better than the one that actually lies within. 2/5 stars.
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