Overview
First came the sin. Then the lies.He was handsome, charming, irresistable, and an eighteen-year-old lady-killer, her uncle Cliff's stepson, Ted. But in one terrible night he would shatter the life of fourteen-year-old Charlotte Dawes and nearly destroy her family. Years afterward, Charlotte would remember that night with fear and loathing, with pain that could be banished only by her work as a gifted architect, building a new world for others as she conceals her own.
For Charlotte's family, prime employers in New England mill town, what happened to Charlotte was the beginning of the end. Her father is left shattered by his daughter's pain. Her troubled mother is unable to cope. And her distinguished family has fallen from grace, plunged into debt. The only rock that sustains them in their darkest hours is a woman whose own guilty secret has given her the power to ruin—or resurrect—the family to whom she owes her life.
Belva Plain's searing novel cuts to the heart of a family ravaged by secrecy. But it is ultimately a story of redemption, the kind that grows when one person dares to tell the truth.
Synopsis
Something terrible happened to Charlotte Dawes when she was 14, something that's become the center of a tangled mass of family secrets that threatens to destroy every member of the Dawes family. No one -- not her father, the well-respected Bill Dawes, or her absent mother Elena, or her uncle Cliff -- knows how to help Charlotte face what her new cousin Ted did to her. Only Claudia, Ted's mother, who must face her own agony at having raised this monster, can reach Charlotte, befriending her, serving as a sort of surrogate mother.
For the Dawes family, what happened to Charlotte was the beginning of the end. Once factory owners and major employers in this New England mill town, the family has been plunged into debt and disgrace. The mill site has been leased to unscrupulous businessmen who are carelessly destroying the environment. And worse: Ted, accused of attacking two other girls, jumped bail and vanished. Charlotte is now in her mid-20s, an architect with a promising future. She's bright, beautiful -- and endlessly alone.
A brief trip to her hometown provides her with a flash of inspiration, an urban renewal project designed to restore the mill site and return her family's respect within the town. She and Roger, the young construction executive whom she befriends in Boston, who takes an enormous interest in the project, begin to make it reality. But after months of preparation, the plans suddenly grind to a halt -- and when Charlotte finally discovers who is at the center of the problem, old secrets rise to the surface again, demanding to be untangled. It's a terrifying process, but one that might open the way for Charlotte to truly let someone into her life.
Combining Belva Plain's signature storytelling with an electrifying narrative that sweeps the reader along to its startling conclusion, Secrecy tells a tale of injustice, of wild hearts and stubborn minds and of a young woman's struggle to make sense of her family.
Publishers Weekly
The characters in this labyrinthine 14th novel from perennial bestseller Plain (Promises) live undercover lives, each hiding a secret from the others. At the center of this web of reticence, which stretches from the mid-1980s to the present, stands Charlotte Dawes. The product of a doomed marriage between flighty Italian-born Elena and decent New England textile heir Bill, teenaged Charlotte endures first her parents' separation, then rape at the hands of a stepcousin, Ted. The evil act is even more destructive because Ted, the one villain in a noble cast, is the son of Charlotte's Aunt Claudia, a widow newly married to her father's brother, and a surrogate mother to Charlotte. Claudia has her own secret, linking the death of her first husband in Chicago and the troubles besetting the Dawes brothers at their failing mill. Although Charlotte becomes a promising architect, she remains traumatized, and it's only when she meets Roger Heywood, a builder, that she can accept physical love. The couple must survive the revelation of another shocking secret, and even a threat from Mother Nature, before their rosy future looms. Plain handles her characters' complex troubles (emotional and financial) with sympathy -- though sometimes with awkward shifts in point of view. She offers us one epiphany after another as the veil of secrecy is gradually lifted, and she allows Charlotte's story an affectingly muted denouement. Literary Guild main selection. (July)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The characters in this labyrinthine 14th novel from perennial bestseller Plain (Promises) live undercover lives, each hiding a secret from the others. At the center of this web of reticence, which stretches from the mid-1980s to the present, stands Charlotte Dawes. The product of a doomed marriage between flighty Italian-born Elena and decent New England textile heir Bill, teenaged Charlotte endures first her parents' separation, then rape at the hands of a stepcousin, Ted. The evil act is even more destructive because Ted, the one villain in a noble cast, is the son of Charlotte's Aunt Claudia, a widow newly married to her father's brother, and a surrogate mother to Charlotte. Claudia has her own secret, linking the death of her first husband in Chicago and the troubles besetting the Dawes brothers at their failing mill. Although Charlotte becomes a promising architect, she remains traumatized, and it's only when she meets Roger Heywood, a builder, that she can accept physical love. The couple must survive the revelation of another shocking secret, and even a threat from Mother Nature, before their rosy future looms. Plain handles her characters' complex troubles (emotional and financial) with sympathy -- though sometimes with awkward shifts in point of view. She offers us one epiphany after another as the veil of secrecy is gradually lifted, and she allows Charlotte's story an affectingly muted denouement. Literary Guild main selection. (July)Library Journal
Plain, who has seemingly inflicted every trauma possible on the hard-luck but resilient subjects of her best-selling novels, here tells of a brilliant young woman who is haunted by the trauma of date rape.New York Times Book Review
[A] withering account of the Government's bottomless appetite for 'intelligence'....It is a dismaying tale, though Moynihan has told it with uncommon liveliness and a mordant wit.—Sam Tanenhaus
Washington Post
Powerful and timely.—John Fialka
People Magazine
Compelling...with Secrecy, Plain delivers yet again.Kirkus Reviews
Plain returns, this time with the story of a young rape victim struggling to overcome obstacles to intimacy and true love. There's also a clammy subplot having to do with a missing person and the infiltration by the mob of an industrial site belonging to an old New England family.Charlotte Dawes is raped at 14 by her cousin-by-marriage, the randy Ted, son of her uncle Cliff's new wife, Claudia, whose first husband was shot in—where else?—Chicago. When Charlotte becomes pregnant, then, her father and her romantic adventuress mother are wild with rage. Both are beside their daughter's bedside as she recovers from an operation for a ruptured tubal pregnancy. In the meantime, Ted continues to assault women and is finally arrested and indicted for rape and kidnapping. Home on bail, he escapes in the night. (Reports from abroad of Ted-sightings occur now and then.) Skip to Manhattan eight years later, where adult Charlotte works for an architectural firm. She loves her work but despairs of forming a firm relationship with a man, sex-shy as she is. She designs for her own pleasure a "public square" fit for the Dawes's now shuttered mill. Unfortunately, her family has inadvertently leased the mill to a polluting waste-disposal firm, to the anger of the town and the despair of the Daweses. Then Charlotte meets the dashing Roger Heywood, whose family deals in commercial real estate. Roger is not only able to come up with the ready cash to finance Charlotte's project, but (of course) coaxes her out of her trauma-related fear of sex. Finally, Claudia, trading on her late husband's mob connections, talks a boss out of retaining the mill. Looks like smooth sailing for the lovers, but disaster threatens again in the form of a flood and a potential terrible discovery.
Plain Plain (Promises, 1986, etc.), but nonetheless name- anointed for success.