This is a story about secrets and the lengths people are willing to go to ensure they remain hidden.
It is a sunny day in London and Agatha, a pregnant, “unseen… inappreciable” grocery clerk is watching Meghan, pregnant with her third child, through the supermarket’s windows. Agatha knows intimate details about Meghan. The fact that Meghan and Agatha are friends is taken for granted, until Agatha admits otherwise.
“We’ve made a connection. We’re going to be friends…” announces Agatha at the end of the first chapter of Australian crime fiction writer, Michael Robotham’s, The Secrets She Keeps seemingly identifying the book’s course.
Finding inspiration from a real life event, Robotham’s The Secrets She Keeps, through the two female protagonists and narrators, Agatha and Meghan, details the pregnancies of two women as they begin to forge an unlikely friendship. Through painstaking detail Robotham explores the human condition and how ordinary people are able to justify extraordinary acts of selfishness, desperation and deception, as Agatha and Meghan’s secrets begin to unravel.
Robotham hits the ground running. Immediately depictions of Agatha as the watcher and Meghan, the watched, leaves readers uneasy. The way Agatha longingly describes Meghan hints at her unstable nature, leaving the reader questioning Agatha’s capacity to be liked.
Michael Robotham
Photo Source: Pulse
However, it is a testament to Robotham’s writing style that readers can feel both disdain and empathy for characters that traverse beyond moral boundaries, exemplified at the end of part one, which leaves the reader with heart palpitations and a gravitational pull to keep turning the pages.
While Robotham somewhat succeeds in creating the urgency and fast paced nature implicit in the genre character development feels laboured.
Agatha, whilst undoubtedly a complex character, defined very much by past experiences, is still revealing events from her past in part two, leaving sub plots involving Meghan’s husband, Jack, feeling skimmed over.
A foreshadowing element of the book, the title, is left in the background as Robotham favours creating complex background stories for both females, that should allow readers to understand future events.
Robotham’s novel is full of twists and turns. Just when the reader settles on the essence of the book; the juxtaposition between middle and lower class as a tool to explore the human desire to want what we do not have, Robotham writes,
“The value of a secret depends upon whom you’re trying to keep it from. You may think it’s worth a lot. I may think it’s worthless. Someone always has to pay.”
Forcing the reader to re-evaluate the significance of secrets within the book’s narrative arc, reorganise the pieces of the puzzle they thought they had, and start again, much like Agatha and Meghan- in their different ways- must do.
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