Thomas Johnson has fled religious persecution in his native land and made a new life in America, taking with him a stolen set of mysterious family heirlooms. When a brief sojourn back in England leads to an unexpected tryst, he can hardly anticipate the consequences, affecting unknowing descendants nearly a century and a half later. David Thomas Kay’s THE SECRET CHILD starts in 1691 and ends in 1857, following multiple generations of interrelated families – Johnsons, Atkinsons, Crosthwaites, and a local Roma troupe. More than anything else, however, the text follows the three stolen magical items and the malevolent spirit that haunts them. Linked by secret liaisons, forbidden relationships, and concealed pregnancies, the families struggle to untangle both the reasons behind their misfortunes and the shape of their convoluted family tree.

The third in the Circles of Time series, THE SECRET CHILD suffers from its breadth, spanning multiple centuries and different epochs of English history. The cast of characters is deliberately complicated, part of the plot focused on discovering the secrets which bind them all by blood. This allows THE SECRET CHILD to offer some detailed glimpses of different facets of English society: the discomfort of English Quakers, only slowly acclimating to a world which no longer actively persecutes them; servants in great houses who both suffer from the predatory attentions of male aristocrats and form nearly-familial bonds with the ladies they wait upon; the itinerant Roma who perform artisan work and trade horses for the settled communities; the children who cart coal in 12-hour shifts to power English industry. However, the characters themselves are merely this – not round characters but flat windows into historical moments.

It’s unclear if the characters, as people, are the focus of THE SECRET CHILD at all. Although the lengthy front-matter includes genealogical information and short descriptions of the characters, and the title seems to indicate that messy interpersonal relationships and secret romances will form the core of the text, the real organizing principle is the trio of magical heirlooms and a spectral green-eyed woman. Unfortunately, neither of those threads ever truly meets the other. Some of the characters have visions or premonitions, but they do so whether or not they possess the magic artifacts; these heirlooms are meant to be inherited only by specific people in specific generations, and improper ownership often causes an untimely death, but there’s no explanation of why this is the case. Although the spectral woman appears more than once, the story never considers whether she, or the heirlooms themselves, have motives or agency. THE SECRET CHILD thus reads more like a list of events than a cohesive plot, and since it never spends enough time with characters for them to feel sufficiently round, there’s little to engage and keep a reader’s attention. THE SECRET CHILD may appeal to readers of the previous books in the series, or to those with a specific interest in English history in the early Industrial Revolution, but its broader appeal is limited by this lack of focus.

Although it renders a portrait of a complex and fascinating period of English history, David Thomas Kay’s THE SECRET CHILD is too focused on describing events, rather than plot or character, to tell an effective story.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader