Series: Standalone
Release Date: June 9, 2020
Meeting each month over margaritas, the trio share laughter, advice, and support. As they help each other overcome challenges and celebrate successes, Elise, Carmen, and DeeDee gain not only a better understanding of the women their mothers were, but of themselves. They also come to realize they have what their mothers needed most but did not have during difficult times—other women they could trust.
Filled with poignant life lessons, The Secret Women pays tribute to the power of friendship and family and the bonds that tie us together. Beautiful, full of spirit and heart, it is a thoughtful and ultimately uplifting story of unconditional love.
• Black main and supporting characters
• Attempted suicide and murder of children
• Death of parent
• Allusions to teenagers drinking
• (Amicable) divorce
• Children (who are late 40s to early 60s) lashing out at parents who start dating after their spouse dies
• See Ending for HEA status.
• See Possible Triggers for Abuse and OTT sad parts.
Format: Paperback
Rating: 5/5 stars
I am so happy that I purchased–and read–The Secret Women. I feel like I’ve been saying this in every post on here and on Instagram, but I seriously love novels that take the time to delve into the characters’ backstory and development. I especially love when personality traits click, that aha! moment where I understand why, for example, Elise is aghast while DeeDee is patient.
While The Secret Women is a story of three very different women bonding over their shared grief, it’s also a story that digs into the past to show the reader how exactly each woman’s family history has influenced their grief. Confronting the last touched items of a loved one, especially someone as influential and important as a mother, is daunting. It also signifies the end of the busy work… with only your emotions left to keep you company.
I really liked how The Secret Women had an underlying theme about love and how there’s no timeline when it comes to grieving someone you loved. Two of the women (Elise and Carmen) have lost their mothers within the past year. However, DeeDee lost her mother 15 years ago, yet, DeeDee is still significantly impacted by her lost and still finds herself grieving her mother every day.
Mothers and their Daughters
The relationship between mothers and daughters is special, much like any relationship is between a child and their parent. However, I find that thematically unpacking the relationship between a mother and daughter allows for insights to be made into the history of the mother and how that history is passed onto the daughter. When attempting to overcome tribulations or trauma, the parent overcompensates in ways to protect their child from that specific hurt. Or maybe, the parent is unaware of the trauma and inflicts the pain of that trauma onto their child, as the character DeeDee experienced with her mother’s bipolar disorder.
Each of the main characters’ mothers has died before The Secret Women begins; therefore, the reader isn’t privy to the relationship between the daughters and mothers. However, the author, Sheila, compensates for this by having the characters reflect on memories and by having them discover letters and journals which help to flesh-out the perspective and feelings of the mothers. I thought by adding the letters and diaries, Carmen (Joan, Jo for short) and DeeDee’s (Laura) mothers felt more real, especially as they led into chapters from their perspectives. I actually cried reading from Jo’s perspective.
The final aspect that I didn’t even think about before starting The Secret Women was the betrayal felt by children when their surviving parent eventually moves on. I found it intriguing that both Carmen and Elise feel/felt profound betrayal when their respective surviving parents moved on because Carmen is in her late 40s, and Elise is in her early 60s! I assumed that the feeling of betrayal only really happens when you lose your parent young. But, this element to Carmen and Elise’s relationships with their parents illuminated how, despite their adult age, they are still kids when it comes to their parents.
Secrets Kept From Family
Obviously, there are many secrets uncovered throughout The Secret Women, hence the title including ‘secret.’ The novel touches on the inescapable truth of the mother-daughter relationship. The daughter doesn’t know everything about her mother’s life because, to the daughter (or child), her mother’s life started after bearing her. Everything before is moot–not of interest. That is until you become an adult and realize your mother is a person who has lived through decades before having you. The Secret Women, therefore, touches upon the grey area of motherhood, where the life of the mother per-motherhood is not necessarily a secret but is also not often discussed. And, so, what results, is secrets being kept from daughters.
However, The Secret Women also unpacks the subtleness of secrets, like the ones you tell yourself. DeeDee has lived her whole life sweeping over her mother and now her sister’s mental illness. She rationalizes, my mother was sick. She’s just sick. But, DeeDee has lived in fear of her mother’s illness; DeeDee has survived the trauma of her mother’s episodes in her youth, yet the trauma remains in her fear. In her paranoia that her daughter, Frances, might also be sick, despite her showing no symptoms. It takes the course of the novel for DeeDee to face her mother’s bipolar disorder and to confront her traumas and fears around the mental illness.
Complications of Identity
I appreciated how The Secret Women didn’t shy away from discussing or unpacking the difficult topics despite the limited page-real estate. Most impressively, Sheila was able to succinctly, yet impactfully, describe to the reader the soul-crushing burden of Laura’s bipolar disorder through her journal entries (and resulting perspectives). Sheila was also able to convey the confusion, exasperation and anger of Jo’s experience with racism while being the other half in an interracial union in NYC during the 60s.
By adding in these layers to each mother (Laura’s battle with her mental illness, Joan’s life in New York City, and Elise’s romantic relationship after her husband’s death), Shiela was able to create fleshed-out characters that I didn’t want to say goodbye to, and who I started to grieve. Sheila successfully made me feel what Elise, Carmen and DeeDee had lost.
In Conclusion
I was so impressed by Sheila’s storytelling and her ability to create three complex yet beautiful stories of motherhood, being a daughter and navigating loss. However, what tied the book together and what made The Secret Women such a page-turner for me was the friendships developed between Elise, Carmen and DeeDee. They pushed each other, were there for each other to rant at and to cry on and, most importantly, they helped each other through one of the most difficult losses in life.
The Secret Women got pushed into 5-star territory because, despite the theme of loss and grief, the book made me smile and left me with a sense of hope. The Secret Women is by no means a romance, yet it encompassed the spirit of the happy for now ending. And, while it’s no happily ever after, I know that whatever the future holds for these three women, they’ll be okay because they have each other to help get them through it.
Buy The Secret Women
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