The Secret Keeper: A Novel

I had a lump in my throat and pit in my stomach the entire time I was devouring this book. I've read all of Kate Morton's novels with deep satisfaction, but none of them rocked me, choked me, and held me in a mysterious state of *dread* the way this one did. I began grieving the minute I began reading. But I wouldn't put it down. It was a personal journey of self-reflection and discovery as well as a compelling story.The novel opens with a jaw-dropping vignette told with little embellishment. It reminds me of a similar birthday celebration cut short with a cake knife, the incident that changed the course of the Mortmain family's idyllic life in "I Capture The Castle." (A lovely classic coming-of-age drama in which, as in Morton's novels, transformation and redemption play large roles, and we are reminded that one can "come of age" over and over with the passage of time.) The events of that day are a climax and a begining at the same time.The story moves up and down stream from 1938 to 1941 to 1961 to 2011 without stumbling. The three main characters, Dorothy, Vivien, and Laurel, are each classic Morton tropes: the mother with a past, the friend involved in a betrayal, and the daughter trying to find the answers that will solve a mystery and reveal her mother as a woman as well as a mum. The story belongs to Dorothy Nicolson, but it's up to her daughter Laurel to tell it.As an actress, Laurel is world famous for being able to slip into the coat of someone else's skin, to reveal what lies beneath without flaying them in grotesque caricature. We all eventually "turn into" our mothers but Laurel goes about it deliberately. Morton never strays too far into Laurel's professional life, keeping her moving and the narrative with her. But casting Laurel as an actress was a deliberate choice made by the author, one of many juicy literary devices employed throughout the novel.The supporting players, the men, are just as skillfully portrayed. Dorothy's first love Jimmy is uncomplicated and wholesome, an Everyman who is so easily loveable and who loves so easily. Even Jimmy's bit-player father leaves a powerful impression based purely on his presence alone. Dorothy's only son and Laurel's baby brother Gerry stands out from the "garden" of Nicolson daughters, not because he's the boy, or a witness or detective, but because Morton describes him so beautifully, even tenderly. Henry Jenkins is the most enigmatic of the supporting cast, but for most of the book, he should be. He is the man whose death so deeply shocks Laurel as it first flutters the carefully drawn curtains blacking out Dorothy's past. As in her other novels, the passage of time, the past, heartbreak, love, mystery, secrets, and redemption are the themes each character must struggle with. Every character, not just the leads. Everyone had their cross to bear. Which of course is true for us all. We all bring our own experience to everything we read, and perhaps that's why I've been so much more profoundly moved by this novel. To have held vigil to loved ones' slow struggle, the unique labor of dying, brought so much to bloom behind the crackling backdrop of this story. It felt as though I was battling the book, as though it was dragging bits and pieces out of me just as much as I was trying to wrench it into a whole, manageable piece. Laurel's journey to uncover her mother's secrets as she lay dying didn't feel like a race against the clock, which it so easily could have, under different author's curation. It flowed smoothly, an acceptance of the ravages of time united with the determination to sweep away as many cobwebs as possible in what little of that precious commodity remained. Morton doesn't spend too much time on minutiae, as she did in The Distant Hours, dulling what could've been a sharp tale. Here in The Secret Keeper her red-ribboned blade flashes as she deftly builds characters while moving the story forward at a gripping pace. She doles out bits and pieces like rationed boiled candy, enough to keep the reader satisfied while keeping you craving for more.This is not a beautiful novel. It is spare by Morton's standards. In sticking so closely to her characters, Morton sacrifices the beautiful sense of time and place she evoked almost too heavily in her previous works. It's like she consciously worked to shed descriptive material to focus on her characters thoughts, feelings, and reactions to each other and their environment, which is risky. Her one true outlet is through the lens of Jimmy's camera, allowing the narrative to pause to describe the horrors of the Blitz. This was a wise choice, because to understand what motivated each character, the reader needs understand something of the frenzied, fatalistic pathos that flourished amongst Londoners as the bombs rained down.In Morton's novels, the Big Mystery (the why, when, where, and how) is always paralleled with the measured discovery of the Who - the revealing details of the characters' personalities, strengths, flaws, and choices. She simultaneously fleshes out characters while flushing out the truth.There are many kinds of trials, many things to survive, many types of survivors. A common theme in Morton's work, each soul is this novel must struggle to survive their own challenges, the battles wrought by their own personalities. Even in the darkest night of the Blackout, where a sliver of light was criminal, life found a way to illuminate people's greatest flaws with harsh truths and harsher lies. Life also finds a way to grant second chances, so rare and precious that some, like Dorothy Nicolson, will never stop being grateful, and will do everything she can to make that second chance count. She dedicated herself to spreading light and locking away the dark shadows of her past. She spent time in reflection and spent time in reflecting the lessons she learned. We could all stand to do the same. We may each choose to wander in our own intentional darkness, but every now and then a book like this is a mirror focused on the reader with blinding inquisition, and all you can do is let it show you what you dare to let it. It's that infamous painful progress of life, moving you forward through time, bending and twisting you into whatever or whoever you're going to become.

I have read all of Kate Morton's books and been to several of her personal appearances. Ms. Morton is engaging, personable and attractive and I would say the same about her books. The Secret Keeper is no exception. Like each of the other books, the story is told with interrupted narrative that switches between time periods and often between points of view. She uses this device well to reveal her puzzle in pieces to the reader. It can be tedious and it can be engaging. Usually in her books, it is engaging. The twist in the Secret Keeper is not terribly surprising, but I think that is because she did a good job of building up to the reveal and making it tie things together. Her books have an excellent sense of time and place. Here the story is in England, alternating between London during the blitz in WWII and present day settings in London, Oxford and the countryside. Ms. Morton is Australian and there is often some connection to Australia in her books. The connection here is small. I understand that there are so many Anglophiles that an English setting may help sales, but I would love to have her write a novel where the primary setting is Australia. The Australian bits are often my favorite parts. Some books change your life, some books change the world, some books are offensive and some are just bad. Her books are none of those. They are however entertaining, well written, and worth reading. If you consider that for a $9 movie ticket you get roughly two hours of entertainment, the price of the book is an excellent value for the hours that you can enjoy reading the story. My book group has been meeting for almost 25 years. The Secret Keeper is the kind of book that many of us will read and enjoy, but it will not be a book group selection for us because there is not enough to talk about.

Like all of Kate Morton's books, The Secret Keeper, a novel that is set in three different periods and follows the lives of three very different women, all linked by a terrible secret, is a rare treasure. This is because it's a story like those you used to read of old, when you were a child and believed that dreams could be fully inhabited, and that your wardrobe really could lead to other worlds, and boarding schools were invented simply to enjoy high teas with friends. This is what I think of as a rainy day novel, the type transports you out of your lounge room, off your cushion, and into another time and place; immerses you in the lives of others making you care, dislike or even love them deeply. So much so, that when the tale ends, you feel as if a little part of you has dimmed.So it is with Morton's fourth book and, in my mind, one of her best. The Secret Keeper, as the blurb on the back teases, starts in a sleepy, gentle 1961, when young Laurel, a teenager on the brink of womanhood, witnesses her mother, Dorothy, plunging a knife into a strange man's chest, killing him instantly.Propelled away from the violence and into 2011, we meet Laurel once again, this time as an accomplished actor in her sixties at the twilight of a brilliant career. Dorothy is about to turn ninety and all the children are summoned home to be beside her, knowing her days are finite and precious. One of five siblings, Laurel is the eldest and, being back with her mother conjures up memories of her past and that inexplicable day when her dreamy, imaginative mother committed a terrible crime - a crime for which she was never held accountable and which Laurel has always kept secret.As her mother's health fades, Laurel determines to uncover the secret that she has kept, to find out who the murdered man was to her mother and what prompted her parent to act in such a way. Discovering a photo she's never seen before, an inscription in a book that bears the name Vivian, Laurel is given her first clues and so, with the help of her brother, Gerard, she sets out to solve the mystery that's shrouded her entire life.This is a sublime novel that moves between 1941 and the London Blitz, to 1961 and then forward to contemporary times, shifting gently, like a soft pressure on the back, as if in a slow dance. It also segues from England to Australia and, in doing so, captures the lives and mores of different women in very different eras. Through the eyes of ambitious, romantic and fanciful Dorothy, who believes herself born to be exceptional, we come to war-torn London, where women worked in service and for their country. Physically attractive, Dorothy turns her back on her family in order to tread the path she believes the fates have carved just for her. Meeting Jimmy, a photographer with an eye for beauty and a loyal heart, she finds love, but it's when she becomes the companion of an elderly rich woman and meets her neighbour, the enigmatic and beautiful Vivian, married to a famous author, that more than fate intervenes with tragic consequences.Then, there's Vivian herself, a child of the antipodes who, through terrible circumstances finds herself in England and at the whim of cruel and dangerous forces, which work to shape and change her.From different classes and with very different outlooks on life, Laurel cannot fathom what brought her mother into Vivian's sphere or vice-a-versa, but as she slowly uncovers letters, journals and more pictures, and begins to make the connections, Laurel begins to understand that she's not the only one keeping secrets...Morton has very much made secrets, letters, memories and diaries, the never mind photographs and stories within stories part of her very female (but not so it excludes male readers, many of whom I know devour her books too) ouevre. In her gifted hands and wonderful imagination, she uses these tropes deftly and smoothly, allowing different voices to share in the story in which readers inevitably become lost.There is something lilting and magical about Morton's prose, her turn of phrase; her exquisite way of rendering the ordinary extraordinary. One example is when Dorothy (Dolly) is working for her peevish lady: `"Perish the thought," Dolly said, posting the boiled sweet through her mistress' pursed lips.'The simple word "posting" (think what else could have been used) is so perfect and transforms what Dolly is doing, making the action something you don't just read about, but witness. That's the beauty of Morton's writing - it appears effortless, flows, but words like that reveal the thought and choice that goes into every sentence. A friend of mine (a fellow writer) once wrote that she had word-envy when reading a particular author. I understand that emotion when reading Morton.What I particularly liked in this book as well is that Morton is not above giving the critics a bit of a serve. At one point in the novel, she has Laurel reflecting on her prefect childhood: "The sort of home life that was written about by sentimental novelists in the type of books branded nostalgic by critics. (Until that whole business with the knife. That's more like it the critics would have puffed.)."Managing to be both self-aware and slightly self-deprecating at the same time she also silences those who might suggest (as some reviewers have) that Morton has become too formulaic, almost saying, what's wrong with that? Or I choose to write this way. I cheered when I read that and thought what's wrong with capturing a corner of the market like Morton has and relishing "nostalgia" and "family drama", celebrating it and making that niche your own? For this is what Morton has certainly done. Not that there's anything wrong with that - not when novels like this are produced.The Secret Keeper is best described as a delicious book. It's something you'll want to savour, to reflect upon, to appreciate for the work of literary art that it is before you return for a second and third serve. This review (and many others) also appears on my website: [...]

Me encanto!!

I always enjoy books by Kate Morton. Really well written and interesting story lines. Keep you intrigued to the end.

Ho acquistato il libro per un regalo, ne sonk stata cotenta e ne acquisterò altri.Molto soddisfatta, come sempre quando acquisto libri su amazon, per la spedizione (arrivato intonso e puntuale) e per il risparmio rispetto alle librerie

After reading The forgotten garden, I was expecting a really good read and she didn’t disappoint. The climax is super awesome

I loved every Kate Morton's book, and this one is no exception. While some people may think this novel a bit slow, I appreciate how the author molds her characters, so that none of them seems flat. The end has a real twist (not one of those advertised on about every book these days) and left me wanting another of Kate Morton's books.