parnassusreads 's review for:

The Secret Place by Tana French

4.0

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I enjoyed this book for its tight focus and dual narratives. It's been a while since I was a teenage girl, but French seems to nail that mystical part of childhood captured in movies like Now and Then or Stand By Me. The mean girls are as vapid and mean as the usual stereotypes, while the misfits have the most character development and complexity. There was a strange element of the supernatural that was explicit but then dropped, almost as a symbol of the relationship that bound the four main girls together. That aspect didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, but the book was still an interesting, fun read.