13 July 2015

Review #271: Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman



My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.” 


----Laura Lippman



Laura Lippman, an American award-winning NY Times best-selling author, has penned an incredibly nail-biting as well as edgy thriller, Every Secret Thing , that was published in the year 2004 and that has won quite a lot of literary awards. The story revolves around two little girls who unfortunately became a part of a horrific and sad murder of a little baby who was left abandoned by a sitter, seven years later, the disappearance of yet another child speculates and brings back the same memory of that child and will life ever be same for those two little girls who have just served seven years in juvenile prison.




Synopsis:

From critically acclaimed, multiple-award winner Laura Lippman comes a riveting story of love and murder, guilt and innocence

Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party find an abandoned stroller with an infant inside on an unfamiliar Baltimore street. What happens next is shocking and terrible, causing the irreparable devastation of three separate families.

Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from “kid prison” to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police, and all the adults in Alice and Ronnie’s lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances.



Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller two eleven year old girls are kicked out of a friend's pool party early because of their misbehavior. On their way to home, they come across an abandoned baby, named, Olivia Barnes, across a porch, whom they steal away thus resulting on their imprisonment in a juvenile prison and the case led by county detective Nancy Porter, everyone gets the justice for the baby's lucky fate of getting murdered by two little children. Seven years later, Alice and Ronnie, promised of a fresh and new life, is once again pulled down the same horrifying memory lane of trials and everything when another baby disappears in the same fashion. So it is now Nancy's duty to find out the real source and the real killer of the crime.

Honestly, why haven't I heard of this author before the movie adaption of the book, bad publicity maybe! I will definitely have to buy all her books after today, since this thriller not only left me thrilled to the very core but the book never once failed to challenge me with it's complexities, questions, innocence and twists. Yeah there is a movie and after watching it, I was completely bowled over by the nicely-woven plot and that led me to look up the author and ordering the very book online.

This story is woven with so many layers, firstly from the premise as well as from the initial chapters it feels very obvious that a bad and vulnerable as well as outspoken white girl like Ronnie and her only friend, Alice who is quite the opposite of Ronnie, together might have killed the African-American baby, Olivia, and all through out the plot, the author poses a question onto her readers' minds about which girl was the one to kill Olivia and that too occurring in a racially-charged-up neighborhood in Baltimore.

The writing is fantastic and I've rarely came across anything so brilliant yet challenging at the same time. The prose is evocative since the story sways to-and-fro seven years before prison and seven years after prison life for both Alica and Ronnie. The author's eye and keen to tiniest details are very evident while sketching out two young girls in the prologue of the story.

The story revolves on what actually happened to Olivia and to the other disappeared kid in the neighborhood through Alice and Ronnie's testimony through variously distinct characters, that are sketched with lots of depth. So the only thing that connects the readers through the point of revelation of the actual happening of the events are through testimony of various people from parents to teachers to police officers to etc. Yes, that means the plot is loosely a character-driven one, as the author takes her readers on a joy ride to let us see through the loves of these human beings and how they have accepted a crime in their lives.

The characters are all thoroughly psychologically flawed as well as they all harbor secrets deep into their souls. The adults, like Nancy, the detective who went at great lengths to bring justice to Olivia's murder, Cynthia, mother of Olivia, still seven years later yearning for vengeance while conceiving a child right after Olivia's death, Sharon Kepelmen, who can't get over the case when she was Alice's public defender, and Alice's single mother, Helen, who is also a school teacher and is still holding back her past, are vividly painted in the novel and how they are still obsessed to the very core.

The protagonists are a brilliant example of character portrayal in a character-driven crime novel, where both Alice and Ronnie are a stark contrast to each other's demeanor and which also questions us the upbringing of a child in a dysfunctional to a single-motherhood kind of families. They are bound to remain as being imprinted upon the readers minds long after reading the book.

The best thing of this crime thriller is that there is no motive, no anger no reason no agenda to take revenge or anything that will lead to a horrifying murder of a baby, so only by depending solely on the cast of characters, the mystery cannot unfold on it's own. Surprisingly there are no main male characters in the book thus making it a women-centric story. This is a book which questions our society and the way it poses the questions feels like a cold hard slap on the face about the way we are raising our children/monsters.

There was not a moment when the book disappointed me with it's unrealistic take of the story, at every point, the author instilled a belief into my heart through this story and the climax is one of a kind and is quite alarming. In a nutshell, this book is a page-turner and like any other literary novel, enlightens a human mind as well as leaves the reader unraveled with the extent of the suspense.



Do watch the movie adaption with the same title, that is directed by Amy J. Berg, featuring, Dakota Fanning, Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks, Danielle Macdonald, which released on 15th May.
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Author Info:
Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working fulltime and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001. Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards. She also has been nominated for other prizes in the crime fiction field, including the Hammett and the Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor’s Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association.

Ms. Lippman grew up in Baltimore and attended city schools through ninth grade. After graduating from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Md., Ms. Lippman attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her other newspaper jobs included the Waco Tribune-Herald and the San Antonio Light.

Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 and has lived there since. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a Sun editorial writer who retired in 1995 but continues to freelance for several newspapers, and Madeline Mabry Lippman, a former Baltimore City school librarian. Her sister, Susan, is a local bookseller.  

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2 comments:

  1. Oh wow, this sounds like it could be a really good book. I can't imagine have been in a kid prison and as well as adapting to life after being released they have to shed the suspicion which is probably on themselves. The movie poster looks good as well!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Olivia, glad you liked it! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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