[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Cecilia Fitzpatrick’s life is almost as spotless as her pantry. There, in the well-lit space, everything is in Tupperware containers, rows and rows of brightly colored canisters that keep her food in order. It helps that she’s one of Tupperware’s top salespeople in Sydney, Australia. She manages her job easily, just as she manages motherhood, and her three daughters are thriving because of it.
But something is not quite right. For six months now Cecilia’s been wondering why her normally sweet husband, John-Paul, has been less than affectionate. After fifteen years of marriage, maybe it’s something every woman encounters. But try as she may to accept it, she can’t imagine how she’s supposed to keep going if this is true.
And then one day, as she’s in her equally tidy attic, she upends a box of tax documents and out falls a letter written to her by John-Paul just after their first daughter was born.
On the envelope, in shaky script, are these words: To my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick. To be opened only in the event of my death. She laughs at first at this dramatic message, but then curiosity overwhelms her. Is it wrong to open it? Well, of course it is, she decides, although the urge increases with each passing hour.
What is in that letter has the potential to ruin the life Cecilia has worked so hard to achieve. It could also demolish her family’s reputation, and it could most certainly end the security that makes Cecilia feel invincible in her tight group of friends.
It would be enough to follow just this one story line, but that is not how this novel is constructed. The author takes us out of Cecilia’s world and into the lives of two other women, each with secrets of her own, and each with ties to St. Angela’s Catholic School, the anchor in this Irish-Catholic community. As we get to know them, a larger world unfolds, and we see them struggle to hold onto love, to keep their children out of harm’s way, and how they decide what to reveal and what to take to the grave.
As gripping as this tale is, it is told with great dashes of humor. The women in this book, mostly forty-somethings, try to be good examples, although they often fail. They swear, they drink a bit too much, they worry over impure thoughts at inopportune times, and occasionally they make decisions that could lead to tragedy.
That is the brilliance of The Husband’s Secret. You are drawn in by the breezy writing, the setting as familiar as the pickup lane at your child’s school. But running beneath the surface are the big questions we all face, those moments when telling the truth is hard, and those rare occasions when what you decide causes the world to shift in a way that shocks everyone around you.
This is the book you need to take to the beach or the lake. You will slip into Cecilia’s world easily, and you won’t be able to look up until you turn that last page.
