Kate Morton's writing is superb. The Authoress and a little girl board a ship in England. She tells the little girl to wait for her, but she never comes back and the little girl is left all alone, sitting atop her suitcase, on a wharf in Australia. Without a name and no one looking for her the portmaster is left with little choice but to take the four-year-old child in. She is given a name and a good life until her father, the portmaster, tells her she is not who she thinks she is. The now 21-year old Nell leaves everything and everyone she has ever known and eventually sets off to find the one person she thinks will give her the answers she so desperately wants - the Authoress. The book switches between a time when Nell is searching for answers about who she is; to her granddaughter searching in England for the answers that Nell never had the pleasure of knowing; and further back to when the Authoress herself was growing up. The book is unputdownable.

A group of small islands off the coast of Virginia are simply known as The Shore. There are thirteen interconnected stories ranging from the year 1876 all the way to 2143. When the stories weren't boring, they were morbid. The book is forgettable. It was hard to keep track of everyone. Sometimes I couldn't even get through a paragraph I hated the book that much. If I hadn't of won this through Goodreads First Reads I would never have finished it. 

Delilah is in high school and obsessed with a fairy tale she finds in the school library. While reading the book one day she notices something drawn onto the sand on Everafter Beach, something that was never there before. Delilah's observation gives Oliver the courage to carve a plea for help into the cliff he's climbing on a page in the fairy tale where he's all alone. He wants out of the book and needs Delilah's help. Together they brainstorm ways to get him out of the book and into her world. I really like the concept for this book, but the whole thing was boring and forgettable with a somewhat disappointing ending.