My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Many reviewers have read and reviewed A Secret Kept after having done so with Tatiana De Rosnay’s first novel, The Secret Key, which received critical acclaim. The general consensus seems to that A Secret Kept can’t hold a candle to its predecessor. Not having read The Secret Key, I’m not hampered by expectations. This book is about a pair of middle aged French siblings, Antoine Rey and his sister Melanie. When they were children, their family took a series of vacations at Noirmoutier Island, and to celebrate Melanie’s 40th birthday, Antoine takes her on a surprise holiday there, hoping to rekindle happy memories. The visit does rekindle memories, but some of them are disturbing. On their way back home, Melanie confides to Antoine that she’s remembered something very disturbing about their mother, who died young. Suddenly, however, their car veers off the road. Antoine is not injured, but Melanie must spend several months in recovery, during which he finds himself suspended with all sorts of questions and speculation, wondering when she will be able to recall the momentous news. ,
The trajectory of this book follows the course of Antoine’s struggle to come to terms with an unwanted divorce. He still loves his wife, who has remarried, and his children, whom he sees on bimonthly visits. Desperately unhappy, he meets a free spirited woman who works as the hospital mortician, and he is stunned to realize that he’s falling in love with her. Melanie finally remembers and divulges the secret she’s discovered about their mother, and set out on a search to uncover how she died so many years ago.
A Secret Kept is a sort of family saga, recounted in real time and in a series of flashbacks. The Reys have always been an uncommunicative family, and, in addition to learning how to live his life anew, Antoine must learn to break out of that destructive pattern if he’s going to become the sort of father and lover that he would like to be. His newly found knowledge about his parents’ secret past, initially a shock, proves to be the key to first finding, and then reinventing himself. This well crafted novel is meditative and full of angst, but not overwhelmingly so, and it’s interesting to watch how Antoine handles having to change much what he thought he knew about who he was. In some places, it’s slow going, but generally worth persevering to the open-ended conclusion. The information about Noirmoutier, which can be reached by a road that’s obliterated by the tide twice is day, is fascinating, and the place becomes an apt metaphor for the book’s central theme.
You're History! 