Book Review:The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

I live in a town called Riverton, which is one of the reasons I picked up this debut novel by Kate Morton, an Australian author. That, and the inviting one-paragraph description in Book Page that told me events of the book take place in an English manor house. I'm a sucker for stories that feature English manor houses.

The story is presented as the first-person confession of the narrator, Grace Bradley, a ninety-eight-year-old woman in a nursing home. At the age of fourteen, Grace entered service as a housemaid at the Riverton manor house where, in 1924, the poet R.S. Hunter committed suicide. The true account of the suicide, and Grace's part in it, is the mystery of the novel not revealed until the last few pages.

A filmmaker working on a movie about these events at the Riverton manor house interviews Grace, and the inquiry prompts Grace to relive her memories, slipping back into time as the elderly sometimes do, and to tape herself speaking of those memories for her grandson, a writer who has recently disappeared after the death of his wife.

Morton handles the time transitions smoothly, flowing between present-day Grace and early-twentieth-century Grace as memories creep up on our narrator, overwhelm her in the last days of her life. Grace admits that the distant past has become more realistic, more vivid for her, than recent memory. Through her, the reader is told the story of the Hartford children living at Riverton--David, Hannah, and Emmeline--to which Grace became so attached. The filmmaker's observations are contrasted with the emotional attachment of Grace's experiences at the Riverton manor, and in this way, the novel does well to illustrate the differences in perception between those who have heard the story of an historic event, and those who lived it.

The House at Riverton is a serviceable novel-skillfully written, enjoyable, but once read, it has served its purpose. It might not be a treasured copy on the bookshelf, read repeatedly throughout the years, but with solid storytelling, an intriguing, if sometimes predictable, plot, and fully-developed characters, Kate Morton keeps the reader invested enough in the story to see it through, and rewards one at the end with every answer revealed, every mystery solved, and every loose end tied up neatly.

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