I often re-read my old favourite books, but it's never happened that I was ready to re-read a book I had just finished, until I read Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden. The book is an intriguing and fascinating interweaving of several voices, several experiences, and several generations.

It opens with Nell, a four year old girl left on a boat bound for Australia by a beautiful young woman she know only as "The Authoress." Nell is told to hide and not come out until The Authoress returns for her. After several hours, the ship sets sail and Nell is still alone. Adopted by an at the time childless couple, Nell is told at her twenty first birthday party that she is not who she thinks she is. It is a statement that dramatically alters her personality and her life.

Seventy years later, Nell's granddaughter, Cassandra, takes up the search for Nell's biological family. Using her grandmother's diaries, and an old illustrated book of fairy tales by the mysterious Eliza Makepeace, Cassandra travels to England and the cottage she has inherited from Nell.

Interspersed between Nell's and Cassandra's stories are that of Eliza, her meager childhood which served for the basis of her vivid imagination, and subsequent move to an estate by the ocean. There, she is subject to her unloving and judgmental aunt, her unusual and disturbing uncle, and her frail cousin Rose. Despite her strict new upbringing, Eliza is too much of a free spirit to be hampered by her new living arrangement.

The storyline of The Forgotten Garden is itself like a fairytale, and its characters can follow the traditional 'good versus evil,' 'beauty versus ugliness' plots, but Morton offers enough insight their lives to keep them from becoming caricatures. And yes, sometimes I found the coincidences of chance meetings between characters a little too convenient, but because of the book's fae elements, they didn't bother me; I just accepted that unseen beings hiding in the forgotten garden were at play.