The Clockmaker's Daughter

This is a novel with many intertwined stories centering around the Birchwood Manor in 1862 England and continuing for the next 150 years. The novel jumps back and forth between the 1800s, 1900s and the year 2017 with way more than needed characters. I almost stopped reading (I didn’t because of the author’s above average prose) Kate Morton’s latest novel until the novel became plausible and understandable on page 160. Normally, I’m not a big fan of flip-flopping novels. How do you figure? For 160 pages I was convoluted and bored, then the story's light bulb came on and suddenly I couldn’t stop reading the next 322 pages. I have never read a novel that handled reminiscing as well as Kate Morton’s did. There are as many chapter narrators as there are characters, but the main narrator is a ghost. Yes, a ghost. I did notice a few similarities with Kate Morton’s novel to Eudora Welty’s 1972 novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, but no presumptions made.

In the summer of 2017, a archiver named Elodie Winslow finds a leather satchel bag containing an artist sketchbook and a sepia photo of a beautiful woman under the stairwell of her workplace. They appear to be from the 1800s. She takes an interest in finding out who this woman was and who owned the satchel with the initials L.S-W. The sketches were beautiful and also contained a scrap of paper saying, “I love her, I love her, I love her and if I cannot have her I shall surely go mad, for when I am not with her I fear…” And the story is off and running. You will meet many interesting characters throughout the novel, such as Edward Radcliffe, a young artist and owner of the Birchwood Manor; his sister, Lucy; Leonard Gilbert, a WWI soldier and scholar; Juliet, a widow with three kids running from Hitler’s bombs of WWII; Jack Rolands, a treasure hunter; Mrs. Mack, a female Artful Dodger; Fanny Brown, Edward’s fiancé; and the very mysterious Birdie Bell / Lily Millington, a pickpocket or an artist model?.

Your first stop after Elodie finds the articles is going back to 1862. Edward Radcliffe invites his gang of Magenta Brotherhood (a group of artists and photographers) to spend a joyous summer at his new manor. Of course we go back to the past and jump to the present for all the participants (I’ve only mentioned a few in the above paragraph). Not for nothing, when you do this much reminiscing, the years start getting jumbled in your mind. Is it 1858, 1862, 1869, 1899, 1928, 1944 or 2017? (That's only a few of the years that the writer flip-flops.) A lot of the chapters start out with a narrator that’s somewhat unidentifiable until halfway through the chapter. Before I got to page 160, I had no idea what the purpose of this novel was. Was it to find a murderer? If so, who got murdered? Was it a mystery or just a semi-gothic story? Will Elodie’s snooping solve the case, if there is a case? And how do these dozens (and I mean dozens) of characters fit into this 150 year old puzzle? Are you confused? You should be. I would rate the first 160 pages poorly (😣) and the next 322 pages (😀😀😀😀)...supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: I only mentioned Eudora Welty’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter in the first paragraph, because of some minor similarities other than the book’s title. For instance, The main character in Kate Morton’s novel had a similar name to the writer of The Optimist’s Daughter...Elodie versus Eudora. Second of all, Welty’s novel was saturated with reminiscing as was Kate Morton’s. As a matter of fact, I looked up the reviews of Welty’s 1972 novel and they were eerily close to mine. One reader said of Welty’s novel, “I’ve read other reviews and realize this book was confusing to some people even to the point that they gave up…” I’m just saying.