The Clockmaker's Daughter

The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton, 485 pages

Archivist Elodie is sifting through a box at work when she stumbles upon a sketchbook that once belonged to Victorian artist Edward Radcliffe. Among the images he sketched are a hauntingly beautiful woman and a gabled, multi-chimney country home that Elodie immediately recognizes from a fairy tale her long-dead mother once told her. From there, the book hops around from Elodie's modern story to that of Radcliffe's beautiful model in the 1850s to a young student at the turn of the 20th Century to a researcher in the late 1920s to a mother and her children taking refuge at the house during the London Blitz. Throughout all of it is a narrative from a ghost who haunts the house, seeing all of these stories as they happen.

I love the idea for this book, but the execution is a bit rough, in part because Morton fleshes out each story SO MUCH — I kept finding myself hooked into a story only to find it dropping off in favor of a different character's story at a different time. I feel like Morton would have done well to cut out a storyline or two, and checked in with Elodie a bit more often (as she is the one who gets us into this whole tale to begin with). Great idea though.