The Museum of Forgotten Memories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton, this is the story of a woman who has to look to the past to find a new future.
Cate Morris and her son, Leo, are homeless, adrift. They’ve packed up the boxes from their London home, said goodbye to friends and colleagues, and now they are on their way to ‘Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World – to stay just for the summer. Cate doesn’t want to be there, in Richard’s family home without Richard to guide her any more. And she knows for sure that Araminta, the retainer of the collection of dusty objects and stuffed animals, has taken against them. But they have nowhere else to go. They have to make the best of it.
But Richard hasn’t told Cate the truth about his family’s history. And something about the house starts to work its way under her skin.
Can she really walk away, once she knows the truth?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harris's tepid latest (after Goodbye, Paris) concerns a London schoolteacher and the travails she faces after being laid off. With nowhere else to go, Cate Morris and her 19-year-old son, Leo, who has Down syndrome, move into a museum owned by the family of Leo's late father, Richard, in rural Crouch-on-the-Sea. Cate and museum caretaker Araminta immediately get off on the wrong foot: Araminta is standoffish, and Cate is horrified by the museum taxidermy. She eventually comes around to Araminta and sees an opportunity to revitalize the museum, and her schemes to attract visitors are met with joy and controversy. Cate takes an instant dislike to Leo's new friend Curtis, who smokes pot when he's not tending to the museum grounds. She also falls for Patch, a handsome artist. Both, however, give her reasons to rethink her opinions of them. With an unappreciative board eager to shut down the museum, Cate and Araminta cooperate to save it, leading Araminta to reveal a big secret. Harris's scenes of discord, such as Cate's bad feeling about Araminta and her habit of threatening other characters with unwarranted calls to the police, fail to earn the intended sympathy from readers, and the plot disappointingly relies on a deus ex machina resolution. The flaws are plentiful enough to undermind the set-up's otherwise promising potential.
