The Secret Place
This book broke my heart. After Broken Harbor, I'd been expecting another terrifying read from Tana French. Instead I got a deeply sad tale about friendship and the things young girls will do to protect (or destroy) each other. The murder victim in this book is a teenaged boy, found on the campus of a girl's boarding school. A year after his death, the case has gone cold, until a new clue narrows the suspect pool to eight teenaged girls, and the detectives find themselves caught in a web of high school drama and endless lies, trying to tease apart exactly what happened.
Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, and everything spirals out of control until all you can do is pick up the pieces.
At least no one died when it happened to my group.
The book splits it's point of view between the detectives working the case, a year after the murder, and the lives of the girls in the year leading up to the murder. The teenagers lie reflexively when talking to adults, and it's as hard for the reader to sift out the truth as it is for the detectives. When all is said and done, there are a handful of mysteries that the detectives still haven't solved, though the reader does get to see how everything comes together.
The supernatural element in this book is also more explicit than it was in French's previous books. While she's always drawn on the vocabulary of horror to sell the psychological horror of it all, she usually shies away from actually confirming paranormal events. So in the books that I've come to think of as the ghost story (The Likeness) or the haunted house story (Broken Harbor), all the weird shit could very easily just exist in the character's heads.
This book is about witches, and there's actual magic to confirm it. Then again, maybe it's just teenagers being teenagers. Most teenage girls go through a witch phase. Your whole life starts spinning out of control and you need something that will make you feel powerful and in control again and witchcraft is right there. I remember afternoons and late nights and sleepless early mornings spent with my girlfriends in high school, casting spells and reading tarot. And at the time there was a part of me that really believed it, or at least really wanted to believe it. So who's to say if the magic in this book is real or just a figment of the girls' imagination?
In all this was a nearly perfect book that reminded me forcefully of all those heightened emotions of being a teenager. Fierce friendship and first love and trying to make sense of a world that has suddenly stopped making sense. Crossing those thresholds on the road to adulthood and knowing that there's no going back. It's powerful and dizzying and I'm so glad I made it to the other side. It's a wonder, sometimes, that any of us do.
Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, and everything spirals out of control until all you can do is pick up the pieces.
At least no one died when it happened to my group.
The book splits it's point of view between the detectives working the case, a year after the murder, and the lives of the girls in the year leading up to the murder. The teenagers lie reflexively when talking to adults, and it's as hard for the reader to sift out the truth as it is for the detectives. When all is said and done, there are a handful of mysteries that the detectives still haven't solved, though the reader does get to see how everything comes together.
The supernatural element in this book is also more explicit than it was in French's previous books. While she's always drawn on the vocabulary of horror to sell the psychological horror of it all, she usually shies away from actually confirming paranormal events. So in the books that I've come to think of as the ghost story (The Likeness) or the haunted house story (Broken Harbor), all the weird shit could very easily just exist in the character's heads.
This book is about witches, and there's actual magic to confirm it. Then again, maybe it's just teenagers being teenagers. Most teenage girls go through a witch phase. Your whole life starts spinning out of control and you need something that will make you feel powerful and in control again and witchcraft is right there. I remember afternoons and late nights and sleepless early mornings spent with my girlfriends in high school, casting spells and reading tarot. And at the time there was a part of me that really believed it, or at least really wanted to believe it. So who's to say if the magic in this book is real or just a figment of the girls' imagination?
In all this was a nearly perfect book that reminded me forcefully of all those heightened emotions of being a teenager. Fierce friendship and first love and trying to make sense of a world that has suddenly stopped making sense. Crossing those thresholds on the road to adulthood and knowing that there's no going back. It's powerful and dizzying and I'm so glad I made it to the other side. It's a wonder, sometimes, that any of us do.
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