I recently read The Forgotten Room, a jewel of a novel by Karen White, Lauren Willig, and our old pal Beatriz Williams, and the first thing that comes to mind is this: So. Many. Tears. (The second is: So glad women no longer wear corsets.) A tale of historical fiction wrapped in romantic suspense, The Forgotten Room is a tearjerker for sure and follows three generations of women as they try to untangle a secret surrounding a necklace. You've heard of blood diamonds. Well, this necklace has a blood ruby, and not just because of the color. It's seen a lot of heartbreak -- and also a little bloodshed.
The Forgotten Room takes us on a journey through the 1890s, 1920s, and 1940s to meet Olive, Lucy, and Kate, a trio of very different women. Cruel circumstances cast Olive as a servant, determination drives Lucy to secretarial school (which sounds weak tea but was quite the coup in the Roaring Twenties), and good old grit and her father's death compel Kate to become a nearly Doogie-young doctor. The plot keeps you guessing as love blooms across decades and class divides. It even has a villain named Prunella, which made me think of prune juice (ew!). As the kids say these days, it's a lot.
The Forgotten Room is filled with moving passages, and my favorite is this one about the passage of time. It's New Year's Eve, 1893, and Olive is waxing reflective:
"All her life, Olive wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new. When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again -- like death, she supposed -- and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future -- 1893, imagine that! --became your present reality." (294)
I think we've all felt like that at least once. Because the passing of time, both in life and in this book, is tinged with a haunting beauty. White, Willig, and Williams's words capture that mysterious magic, a theme that runs through Room and readers' love affair with everything retro and vintage.
It was so hard to get this story out of my head that I ransacked my craft supply stash for a red rhinestone something. My efforts were rewarded with the last red and white rhinestone slider bead from an old broken bracelet, itself its own kind of vintage, and I lost no time stringing it with black and red beads. The resulting necklace -- which I like to call the Half Blood Chintz-y -- is much more modest than the kind I usually create, but I think that makes it strangely -- to borrow an old-fashioned term -- fetching.
So, there you have it: jewelry, intrigue, and bittersweet love.
Forgotten Room, I'll never forget you.