The Forgotten Room

by Lauren Willig

January 19, 2016 · NAL

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When I saw that Lauren Willig was one of three authors of what was described as “a blend of romance, historical fiction and family saga,” I was like OMG PUT THAT IN MY HANDS RIGHT NOW. The Forgotten Room checks the box for all three categories, but unfortunately I found a lot of the tropes within the book to be tired and I struggled to really engage with the heroes. As family saga/ historical fiction it worked pretty well for me. As a romance, it did not.

The Forgotten Room is set in three eras and follows three women. In 1892, Olive Van Alan goes to work as a maid for the wealthy Pratt family in their mansion on 69th street in New York. Olive was not always in service. Her father was a successful architect who designed the Pratt family mansion, but when they refused to pay him, they ruined his career and drove him to suicide. Olive is working for the family under an assumed last name partially because she needs the money and partially to find evidence that will posthumously clear her father’s reputation. During her late-night snooping, Olive runs into Henry Pratt, Jr. (aka Harry), home from school for the holidays. Harry is an artist, and is immediately taken with Olive and is inspired to paint her. The two begin to fall in love and embark on a doomed upstairs-downstairs romance.

The second story is set in 1920 and follows Lucy Young, Olive’s daughter. Lucy grew up in the family bakery in Brooklyn, with her mother who seemed resigned to a life she didn’t want. Lucy suspects that a man named Harry, who her mother met while working at the Pratt mansion, might be her real father, not the German baker she grew up calling “Vati.” She takes a job as a secretary at a law firm that handled the Pratt estate, hoping to dig up some information as to who Harry was and how he knew her mother. She finds herself torn between the attentions of Phillip Schuyler, her boss, and John Ravenel, a client of the firm who is searching for his lost father, too.

The third story is set in 1944 and follows Lucy’s daughter, Kate Schuyler. Kate is a doctor, currently working in a wartime hospital in the old Pratt mansion. When Captain Cooper Ravenel is brought to her — critically wounded — she thinks he’s delirious when he claims to recognize her. Then she finds a miniature portrait in his possession of a woman who looks exactly like her, wearing a necklace that looks exactly like one her mother gave to her. Kate is determined to find out the connection before Cooper is released all while avoiding her attraction to him.

All three stories are woven together around a secret room in the Pratt mansion attic where Harry used to sneak off with Olive to paint her portrait, hence the title.

In some ways this book is a love story that takes three full generations to come to fruition, but because of all the intertwining pieces, that was occasionally confusing.

For me, the biggest issues with the novel were the heroes and the portrayal of “other” women. Let’s start with the heroes. All three men — Harry, Philip and Cooper — put the heroines in serious jeopardy when they begin to pursue them, even if their intentions aren’t malicious. In Olive’s case, an Upstairs-Downstairs romance almost always leads to the Downstairs party being dismissed in shame. Harry is a romantic, and he truly loves Olive and wants to run away with her, but I don’t think he ever fully appreciates the precariousness of her situation. His class standing is so far above hers that he can he destroy her ability to find other domestic employment by pursuing her romantically–hell, even by just painting her.

Philip is engaged to another woman, Didi Shippen, and is miserable when he begins to fall for Lucy. He takes Lucy to a speakeasy and kisses her, and she dresses him down gloriously, which was a lot more satisfying than what happens in the other two storylines.

Cooper is pretty much in love with Kate at first sight, and like the other heroes, makes no attempt to hide it. He steals kisses. He flirts. The entire nursing staff is gossiping about Kate and Cooper, and when a male peer sees Cooper kiss her, it jeopardizes Kate’s standing. She’s not well accepted as a female doctor and struggles for her peers’ respect–Cooper’s pursuit of her plays into the doubt about her fitness to do her job.

Now, class issues come up all the time in romance novels. It’s a familiar plot conflict. The only time it works for me, though, is when the hero is fully cognizant of the fact that his station above the heroine’s means anything he does runs the risk of, quite frankly, ruining her life. In all three cases, the heroes in this book have the ability to destroy the heroine’s careers and sources of income by thoughtless actions, and while their intentions were pure, I didn’t feel that they fully understood how precarious the situation was for the heroines.

In Harry’s case, I felt like he was really young and romantic and I forgave him more, but I was irritated by how far Philip and Cooper had their heads up their asses. Philip especially doesn’t taken into account the fact that he’s in a position of power over Lucy as her boss, and he could be making her feel pressured to accept his advances. Also both Philip and Cooper are both engaged to other women, which automatically taints their professed love for Lucy and Kate — women whom they could ruin — with a little bit of “Uh huh. You love her. Suuure you do.”  Kate and Lucy don’t necessarily buy that this is anything more than a dalliance and neither did I.

Which brings us to the “other” women. Both Philip and Cooper’s fiancees are portrayed as cold, aloof, selfish women. The “other” woman in Olive’s story is Harry’s sister, Prunella, who is determined to see Olive ruined for no other reason than she’s an awful human being. Didi and Prunella come across as mostly materialistic and scheming.

I’m just really, really tired of books with the beautiful, ice queen villainous ‘other woman.’ Unless she’s an actual ice queen in which case, BRING IT. Otherwise, I hate the other woman trope. It’s tired. It contributes to the bullshit idea that women have to tear each other down because there are only so many good things (in this case men) to compete over. Prunella, Didi and Caroline (Cooper’s fiancée) are portrayed as selfish, foot-stamping, spoiled brats. It’s a way of showing how good the heroine is by comparison — “pure” and “kind.” It’s a lazy method of characterization for the heroine, it makes the heroes look like dicks for cheating (except Harry), and it’s a damaging and outdated portrayal of women in general.

As I said, The Forgotten Room worked okay for me on the historical fiction and family saga front. I enjoyed following the Pratt mansion through its many lives over the years and I was invested in unraveling what really happened between Olive and Harry. As a romance, it falls short, in part because  I would have appreciated more nuanced, complex portrayals of the secondary female characters.