A review by hanspam
The House of Secrets by Sarra Manning
4.0
I can remember reading Sarra Manning's Diary of a Crush column in Just Seventeen and J17 magazine when I was growing up, and loving Dylan and Edie and all their friends. Since then, I've read nearly all of the books she's published, and there hasn't been one that has disappointed me. A couple hold secret places in my heart (Nobody's Girl and Unsticky), and The House of Secrets looks set to join them...
The book splits between two timelines, one in the 1930s focusing on Libby, a thirtysomething whose husband has abandoned her after she lost their baby, and the second in present-day London, with Zoe and Win also recovering from an horrendous miscarriage where they didn't realise Zoe was pregnant until it was too late. Their stories are connected by a house in Highgate, bought for Libby in the 1930s, and bought by Zoe and Win 80 years later, and something contained within draws Zoe to Libby's story...
There seem to have been a lot of books published recently where there are multiple timelines, and this appeals to my short attention span as the story moves from period to period and back again. At first, I was much more enamoured with Libby in the 1930s, feeling outraged by the behaviour of her husband Freddy (who reminded me an awful lot of Esmond Romilly, is that just me?), and Libby's determination to pick herself up and avoid being brought down by her vile mother-in-law struck a chord. In contrast, Zoe and Win's present day troubles took longer to draw me in, but once they did I was rooting for their story to end well - even though, for a lot of the time, I thought their happy ending meant that they wouldn't end up together.
It's not giving too much away to say that both stories contained within The House of Secrets share more than a common house, but the heartbreaking loss of a child before its birth, and Zoe tries to find out what happened to Libby once she finds a suitcase filled with her possessions (including a diary and a baby's outfit) in the house - the house which had not been lived in until she and Win bought it. I couldn't be further away from being in a similar situation to that of both Libby and Zoe, but that should never be a barrier to enjoying good fiction, and as the book progressed I found myself racing towards its conclusion as I was desperate to find out how it ended. Unusually, I couldn't predict the ending - as I mentioned above, I wasn't convinced there was a happily ever after for Zoe and Win, and Libby's situation with the too-good-to-be-true Hugo also looked desperate as the book went on. Without wishing to give anything away, I was happy with the way that both tales ended, but because I read the latter third of the book so quickly I definitely need to read The House of Secrets again. More than once, and hopefully with a giant mug of tea and Dolly Mixtures to hand...
The book splits between two timelines, one in the 1930s focusing on Libby, a thirtysomething whose husband has abandoned her after she lost their baby, and the second in present-day London, with Zoe and Win also recovering from an horrendous miscarriage where they didn't realise Zoe was pregnant until it was too late. Their stories are connected by a house in Highgate, bought for Libby in the 1930s, and bought by Zoe and Win 80 years later, and something contained within draws Zoe to Libby's story...
There seem to have been a lot of books published recently where there are multiple timelines, and this appeals to my short attention span as the story moves from period to period and back again. At first, I was much more enamoured with Libby in the 1930s, feeling outraged by the behaviour of her husband Freddy (who reminded me an awful lot of Esmond Romilly, is that just me?), and Libby's determination to pick herself up and avoid being brought down by her vile mother-in-law struck a chord. In contrast, Zoe and Win's present day troubles took longer to draw me in, but once they did I was rooting for their story to end well - even though, for a lot of the time, I thought their happy ending meant that they wouldn't end up together.
It's not giving too much away to say that both stories contained within The House of Secrets share more than a common house, but the heartbreaking loss of a child before its birth, and Zoe tries to find out what happened to Libby once she finds a suitcase filled with her possessions (including a diary and a baby's outfit) in the house - the house which had not been lived in until she and Win bought it. I couldn't be further away from being in a similar situation to that of both Libby and Zoe, but that should never be a barrier to enjoying good fiction, and as the book progressed I found myself racing towards its conclusion as I was desperate to find out how it ended. Unusually, I couldn't predict the ending - as I mentioned above, I wasn't convinced there was a happily ever after for Zoe and Win, and Libby's situation with the too-good-to-be-true Hugo also looked desperate as the book went on. Without wishing to give anything away, I was happy with the way that both tales ended, but because I read the latter third of the book so quickly I definitely need to read The House of Secrets again. More than once, and hopefully with a giant mug of tea and Dolly Mixtures to hand...