The ghost is prone to using over-the-top dramatic language that feels forced and out of place. Then, suddenly, everything is tied neatly together, all too conveniently as characters act on “flash of certainty” that are so unexplainable that they “might actually have been a symptom of madness.” The connections rely so heavily on actions made by characters whose motivations are so unidentifiable, they can only be explained away as a feeling or a crazy impulse.Īlthough Morton’s writing is largely strong and enjoyable, the prose used for the ghost’s sections is odd, to say the least. The connections between the many plotlines often don’t make much sense until the end, which makes reading chapter after chapter of these characters seem pointless. Morton has added unnecessary chapters to detail the entire life story of minor characters.
Suddenly, Morton drops Elodie’s plotline for over 100 pages of flashbacks to various years that explain the history of those who lived in the house and the mystery of the ghost who lives there. While the strong feeling Elodie has is convenient to the plot, unfortunately it doesn’t create enough motivation for the reader to care about the house or its specific history. Elodie insists to her friends and family that the house in one of the sketches is the same house from a story her mother used to tell her - citing a weather vane - and this leads her to feel a connection to the sketch and the photograph that Elodie realizes makes her “frankly, a bit unhinged.” This weak connection of a weather vane and a children’s tale is apparently enough to launch an investigation, which in the beginning the reader knows is somehow tangentially related to the mysterious ghost of Birchwood Manor, whose father is a clockmaker.
The clockmaker book archive#
When she finds a satchel at the archive of Joseph Stratton containing the photograph of a woman and a sketchbook, she is unnaturally captivated by the objects in the satchel. The beginning of the novel focuses on Elodie, a historian and daughter of a great musician mother who passed years ago, as she prepares for her wedding to a man she doesn’t seem to love. So many different perspectives are given - all very tenuously and too conveniently connected - that by the end of the novel, it is quite unclear who or what this novel is truly about, and nothing feels resolved. Although the ghost’s past is mysterious, the ultimate shortcoming of Kate Morton’s newest novel, “The Clockmaker’s Daughter,” is its inability to effectively tie together its many plotlines. “It is different on this side,” the ghost of Birchwood Manor explains.
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