The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morten

I read Distant Hours last summer and enjoyed it, so I decided to read another of Morton's novels.

This story starts with Nell, a woman who, as a child, was sent from London to Australia on a ship under mysterious circumstances.  She isn't told this until she is an adult, then she spends much of the rest of her life trying to learn what happened.  Meanwhile, many years later, her granddaughter Cassandra is trying to unravel the same mystery after inheriting a cottage in England upon Nell's death.

It was fun trying to follow the story in three different time periods: Nell's childhood, Nell's adulthood, and Cassandra's adulthood.  The story unfolds seemingly in order to the reader, but the characters in the story are figuring out what happened at different times. One of the other characters is an author of fairy tales, so those are woven in to the story, along with real life fairy-tale elements: wicked stepmothers, poor children sentenced to a life of arduous work, illegitimate children, etc. 

Juicy, indeed.