Genre: Historical Fiction
Description:
“When Maggie Bryan works up the nerve to tell her parents she’s
pregnant, they immediately disown her. Later that night, her boyfriend is
killed. In desperation, she turns to her brother, Sam. Against his wife’s
wishes, Sam brings Maggie to his home in rural Pennsylvania.
While Maggie awaits the birth of her child and navigates the tension
in her new home, she decides to finish high school. There, she meets Anne
Phillips, a volunteer educator and full-time architect. Over time, Maggie
becomes drawn to Anne in ways she doesn’t understand, but she knows enough to
keep her feelings hidden.
After a devastating loss, Maggie tries to move on, but secrets and
betrayals keep her from living her fullest life. Beginning in the late 1940s
and spanning decades, My Secret to Keep portrays a woman at war with
society, her family, and herself.”
Author:
A former health care worker who now works in finance, Barbara Conrey
lives in Pennsylvania where she tries to satisfy her passions for travel,
reading, writing, hiking and exploring antique shops. (Not to mention her beagle,
Miss Molly.)
Appraisal:
The book’s first chapter kicks off in 1982 with Maggie, the
protagonist, planting flowers outside a house, then coming in the house to
discover Anne has died. Who Anne is and what Maggie’s relationship to her isn’t
clear. We’ll spend much of the book figuring that out along with Maggie and
Annie as the second chapter flashes back to 1948, before Maggie has even met
Annie, but is going through another life-shaking and life-changing event.
What happens to Maggie, Anne, and a few other important characters
between 1948 and 1982 makes for an intense, thought-provoking story. It
illustrates how much the world has changed in some ways and how awful the world
was for some people at points in the past. (And you’re right. We’re still far
from perfection.) While some parts of the story the reader has an idea of how
they’ll end based on hints from the first chapter, the specifics of the route
the story will take to reach that end are interesting and at times will be
surprising. An excellent read.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 90-95,000 words
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