Showcase - Review The Forgotten Room by Karen White, Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig

It's amazing what happens when three of your favorite authors decide (over perhaps a glass of wine) to coauthor a historical anthology, it becomes an amazing melding of talents that I immediately fell under the spell of and resulted in a wonderful, unforgettable keeper shelf novel.

For those interested in learning more about the background here is an earlier interview with the authors from Happy Ever After.

I hope you enjoy my showcase/review!

ISBN-13: 9780451474629
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Release Date: 01/19/2016
Length: 384pp
Buy It: B&N/Amazon/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible

Overview

New York Times bestselling authors Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig present a masterful collaboration—a rich, multigenerational novel of love and loss that spans half a century....
 
1945: When critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenel is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion.
 
Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel’s miniature portrait who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother? In their pursuit of answers, they find themselves drawn into the turbulent stories of Olive Van Alan, driven in the Gilded Age from riches to rags, who hired out as a servant in the very house her father designed, and Lucy Young, who in the Jazz Age came from Brooklyn to Manhattan seeking the father she had never known. But are Kate and Cooper ready for the secrets that will be revealed in the Forgotten Room?
 

My Review

Three amazing authors piece together a literary masterpiece, a fateful and at times painful journey featuring lies, deceptions and ill-fated love. It spans three generations and alternates through three different time periods staring three women protagonists and a stable of exceptional co-stars including the forgotten room itself. Readers are faced right away with a dilemma, a mystery that these outstanding authors spend the entire novel solving with their vivid depictions of people places and things and a flawless, fluid prose like and period perfect narrative, and so seamless it’s hard to believe it’s coauthored. Amongst the OMG revelations fans of each individual author will see tell tale clues specific to each, and all readers will see an unforgettable, keeper shelf jewel. So be prepared to laugh and to cry and to lose your heart to this incredible sweeping epic tale.

The audible edition of the novel is expertly narrated by the duo of Morgan Hallett (narrator the 1942 characters) and Susan Bennett (narrator of the characters from 1892 and 1920 – and the voice of Siri) who each represent their characters flawlessly and effectively highlighting the traits of each time period and player while providing a more all-encompassing, three-dimensional experience of the novel.

Three generations of women from one family each share a personal and familial connection to a forgotten attic room in a New York mansion built at the very end of the Gilded Age. If only walls could talk.

In 1944 critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal returns to the US from the fighting in France and ends up in a Manhattan mansion turned military hospital. Tending him is the very unconventional Dr. Kate Schuyler who just happens to have a striking likeness to the woman in the miniature portrait painted by his famous artist Grandfather.

In 1892 Olive Van Alan gets one step closer to exacting her revenge against the family who ultimately cost her father his life and her family everything when she gets hired as a housemaid for the Pratt family in their Manhattan mansion. Then she meets beautiful artist Harry Pratt and suddenly everything changes.

In 1920 Lucy Young is hired by the firm who handles the legal affairs of the Pratt family, a family Lucy just may be a member of if she can prove she’s the illegitimate daughter of one of the Pratt sons. While working for the firm Lucy meets a Mr. Ravenal a SC art dealer who has a miniature portrait of a woman who looks like her, a woman who was the assumed muse and suspected mistress of Mr. Ravenal’s artist father.

 Connect with the authors Karen White - Beatriz Williams - Lauren Willig

       Karen                    Beatriz                Lauren

MEET the Authors:
Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between, among other novels. Beatriz Williams is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, and Overseas. Lauren Willig is the New York Timesbestselling author of The Lure of the Moonflower, That Summer, and The Other Daughter, among other novels.

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