Emotionally, my impulse is to give this novel three or three and a half stars, but it was so well written and interesting to think about on a more intellectual level that I just have to up it to four stars. Tampa is definitely not a book for the faint of heart, nor is it for literature Puritans who insist on sanitizing away the nastier bits of human existence from the written word, as if that will make them stop existing. Nor is it for […]
Family secrets and mid-life crisis
This book, by the author of Sarah’s Key, also takes place in Paris and also has two time lines—the present and the past—but that’s where the similiarities between the two books end. A Secret Kept is the story of a shattered French family, told from the standpoint of the adult son Antoine, who is going through a mid-life crisis, looking back at his past and trying to make sense of it. He is an apparently successful architect who has lost his creative thirst; he has […]