THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN * THE VIRGIN BLUE

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton - This was recommended by my Meals at Home delivery partner, Laura, so I got it right away, because she knows which books I'll love, and as usual, she was right. The Forgotten Garden is a beautiful story about a woman who never knew her true identity, her grand daughter Cassandra, and an authoress named Eliza Makepeace who wrote fairy tales. Like so many of my favorite books recently, this one takes place in both the past and the present, where the present day main character, usually a young woman, sets out to solve a secret or mystery among her ancestors who lived hundreds of years ago. Chapter by chapter, the author takes us forward and backward in time, and often the stories parallel each other in some way. The young woman in the past was often hurt or powerless in some way, while the young woman in the present has every freedom at her disposal. I loved the landscape of this story as well as the characters and the story itself, and am off to the online library to see whether Kate Morton has written anything else....

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier - I found this book last weekend at a yard sale with Debby and Barbara. Books were 5 for a dollar, and this was brand new and the cover intrigued me for some reason. I'm so happy it did, because it was wonderful and I've read it in two days! It's that same genre I just wrote about, only in this case, it takes place in France and Switzerland in the 1500s and the present. A young woman moves to a small picturesque but gossipy french town, and decides to investigate her family tree. I hadn't remembered or completely understood the Huguenot/Catholic French history, although I remember hearing about it in history class at some point. This story will help to clear that up, too. Too bad history books aren't written as fictionalized accounts of women solving family mysteries. I would've aced every class!