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452 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2014
"If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods."
"Things don't make sense, when you're that age; you don't make sense."
“This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.”Reducing Tana French's books to a simple concept of "murder mysteries" would be like describing Anna Karenina as "that story about the train".
¹Apparently Tana French does think so. From the question she answered here on GR about this book, "...but you're right, I'm way more interested in the whydunit than in the whodunit. I think the really important question about murder is what can bring a normal person, someone who doesn't enjoy inflicting harm, to the point where he or she believes that murder is necessary or even desirable."And sometimes she rips our hearts to shreds and leaves them to bleed.
Remember the time - the era, the epoch even - when you lived in the intense and magical and fragile and frustratingly confusing world of adolescence? When feelings, emotions and passions were always this close to the surface, when the smallest events had the greatest significance, when tensions were everywhere, when no adult could ever understand you, when it was you against the new and changed and strange world with suddenly new confusing rules, and when friendships and relationships were forever, were blindingly intense, were the essence of what made you.![]()
“I never thought I’d have friends like you guys, Becca says, deep inside the third night. Never. You’re my miracles.”
“... But that age; remember that age? They’re not the same. They don’t put things together. That’s why half of what they do looks full-on certifiable, to you or me or any sane adult. Things don’t make sense, when you’re that age; you don’t make sense. You stop expecting to.”In The Secret Place - the fifth book of Dublin Murder Squad pseudo-series ('pseudo' because the connections between the books are quite slight, with a supporting character in one of them taking the lead role in the next, allowing you to be able to read them out of order and still understand everything), Tana French brings to focus the world of teenage girls in a Dublin boarding school, St. Kelda's. A year ago, a sixteen-year-old boy Chris Harper from a neighboring boarding school for boys was murdered in the middle of the night in the cypress grove on the idyllically beautiful school grounds. The murder was never solved, the case went maddeningly cold.
“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”![]()
“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”On the other hand, we have a delicately tentative formation of friendship between Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway, the friendship that has lots of prickly angles and mistrustful hang-ups to navigate. Moran and Conway both come from the poor urban areas of Dublin - a world away from the cozy secure comfort of St. Kelda's, and they see this alien to them world of privilege through very different eyes: Conway is prickly and derisive of the snotty rich, and seems to care very little about it; Moran is taken in by the serene beauty of this place, and is ready to claw his way to the security it promises. There are all kinds of kinks to iron out, and heads to butt, and plenty of baggage to reckon with; the illusions and dreams to set free before forging something new.
“The weaving lights are starting to look like living things, giddy and desperately lost. Selena’s going watery at the edges, starting to lose hold of the boundary line where she leaves off and other things start.”And, by the way, it is the evocative beauty of Tana French's descriptive language that shines through the quote above that made me highlight so many passages in this book, and just looking through them makes me want to crack this book open again and once again immerse myself into the world she created, this time knowing everything that happened, and with this knowledge hanging on to the beauty of the relationships she created, now knowing how truly fragile they can be despite the hope that some things can last forever.
...a place like this is riddled with secrets but their shells are thin and it's crowded in here, they get bashed and jostled against each other; if you're not super-careful, then sooner or later they crack open and all the tender flesh comes spilling out.
...the whole point of the vow was for none of them to have to feel like this. The point was for one place in their lives to be impregnable. For just one kind of love to be stronger than any outside thing; to be safe.
They are a forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.
I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.
“Alison’s mum has had a lot of plastic surgery and she wears fake eyelashes the size of hairbrushes. She looks sort of like a person but not really, like someone explained to aliens what a person is and they did their best to make one of their own.”After a while, reading more and more about the annoying and empty schoolgirls...I was like..... .I don't give a toss who killed the boy...in fact, kill all the girls as well.... just kidding!!! But most if not all of them were so on the surface...
“ “If I've learned one thing today, it's that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods."Not my favorite in this series.