Still only in her mid-twenties, Felicity “Fee” Price is known to some as “the devil’s daughter.” A scion of the notorious, ultra-rich Price family, she serves as the family’s enforcer, holding external competitors to ruinous contracts as well as keeping other family members in line. But just when she learns that she’s being married off to a business competitor without any input on her part, a chance encounter gives her the opportunity to question her life, seek freedom and happiness, and feel true love for the first time.
It is not the responsibility of any single work to revolutionize or redefine a genre, or to negotiate the relationship between a traditionalist genre and current cultural discourse. It’s also true that as genres go, romance in particular can thrive on rehashing comforting fantasies for its readers. That said, it’s hard to escape the fact that Anaïs Ventura’s TELL ME A SECRET is a novel that reinscribes extremely conservative traditional social values, in ways that seem retrogressive even within the broad scope of the romance genre. This is a book about two immensely privileged, conventionally-attractive children, both from ultra-rich families, entering a heterosexual relationship with monogamous marriage as its goal. In this regard, TELL ME A SECRET falls behind both its contemporary peers and classic exemplars of the genre – which have often involved class transgression, at least.
In and of themselves, these aren’t necessarily problems, but in TELL ME A SECRET, these ultra-conservative values adversely affect the storytelling itself. Fee and Leo fall immediately in love without any real justification; they’re just young, attractive, and inexperienced. This flimsiness is reinforced in recognizable versions of “you’re not like other girls” (“She was different from anyone I’d ever met, yet familiar”) and a consistently, uncomfortably possessive vocabulary with some eye-rolling bursts of machismo (‘“I’m not going anywhere until I see my woman, so I suggest you take a step back before I make you’”). The weakness of these foundations carries through to the resolution of the main plot. A great deal of time is spent establishing how rich and powerful Fee’s family is, and the central obstacle to Fee and Leo’s relationship is the Price family patriarchy. It feels like such a setup demands an interesting solution: either some clever way of outmaneuvering the family’s lawyers and thugs, or an intensely-dramatic act that changes the game entirely. Neither happens here; an extremely minor side-character acts as the deus ex machina, robbing Fee and Leo themselves of actual agency. Fee has some questionable skills as a family enforcer, but is also interested in (and skilled at) fashion design; she never uses her knowledge or talents to fight her family. Leo is some kind of vaguely-defined tech company manager; he never uses either tech skills or business acumen to get a leg up on the Prices. When the actions of a third character create an escape route for the protagonists, they simply buy their way out of trouble. It’s a hit to their net worth, and Fee has to sell some tens of thousands of unnecessary wardrobe items, but there’s no real sacrifice for the sake of the relationship.
As noted above, it would be unfair to shift cultural moral responsibility onto any single work of literature. However, on purely narrative terms, it’s surprising and unsatisfying to find that every single rich, privileged character in TELL ME A SECRET escapes any consequences for their actions. Not only side-characters and antagonists, but the protagonists themselves, have committed crimes and generally behaved in morally reprehensible behavior. There is no comeuppance for any of them; it’s taken for granted that these people are all rich and powerful enough to be legally untouchable, so they just walk away from their sins. This makes it difficult, and uncomfortable, for the reader to like any of the characters, or to root for their success.
While this reviewer particularly appreciated frank discussions about STI testing between the lovers, for instance, the over-reliance on genre tropes undermines the character development and storytelling. The raw material is here for a more interesting and engaging story – with more rounded characters and more grounded romance – but TELL ME A SECRET needs to build that story from the ground up, with more attention paid to the fundamentals of its overall narrative structure.
With prose that is capable and clear, and aspects of the developing relationship that feel satisfying and modern, Anaïs Ventura’s TELL ME A SECRET will scratch an itch for romance-novel enthusiasts happy with standard fare.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader