Game of Secrets by Dawn Tripp
My rating: 3/5 cats
when you play the game of secrets, you win…or you die.
nahhh, nothing as dramatic as that, and not one single dragon.
this book is better than it looks, but not as good as i had hoped.
it has beautiful language but a really clunky plot.
it made my rhode islander’s heart swell with its mentions of del’s lemonade, lincoln dog park, newport jai alai, and coffee milk. but the relationships, both romantic and familial, left me without heartswells at all.
the family secrets were everywhere on the spectrum from “expected” to “bananas.”
the scrabble subplot, which i had hoped would be an experience of buried secrets doled out within the context of an innocent game, turned out to be just a banal game, with occasional folksy metaphor, ruined by the secret that was on the “bananas” end. seriously—what was that?
there were either printing errors in mine that changed characters’ names, or characters who appeared and disappeared into the various plots.
there was either a lot of character-misperception or really graceless blocking by the author in her attempt to mask the truths of the past, and the importance of the characters therein.
in short, there were problems.
it was perfectly readable, and some of the writing about the perilous relationship between mothers and daughters and the teenage sulk that never quite leaves was good, but there was never a good enough reason for these characters’ rift, or marne’s scorn towards her mother. there were moments of insight and beauty, but overall, the plot was being pulled in too many directions, and she lacked the connective thread that is what makes books like this work. there was never an “aha” gasp that brought all the stories up short to reveal their pattern. there were just words. on a flat board. branching off in too many directions.
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