The Secrets We Kept - Book Review

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I picked up an ARC of Lara Prescott's The Secrets We Kept at BookCon. It was the last book of the day, and I was intrigued by the display advertising the book (a giveaway for an old-school typewriter) and the premise of the book: female spies.

(Apparently, so was Reese Witherspoon. This is her September book club pick.)

However, this book was totally not what I was expecting. That's not a bad thing, but when the book starts out talking about the author of Doctor Zhivago, I was like, "What?" So basically, the story goes back and forth between East/Russia and West/U.S. There's Olga, the mistress of author Boris Pasternak, and her story in Russia. Then, there's Irina, an American-born Russian, who lands a job as a typist in the Soviet Russia Agency in Washington, D.C. But she ends up doing a little bit more than typing. There's also Sally, a former "Swallow" or lady spy, who is itching to get back in the game. And there are the other typists. The story alternates between all of these points of views, and getting used to that switching back and forth took awhile to get used to.

It was definitely interesting to get all the different points of view and understand the driving force behind everyone's actions, as well as see how the keeping of secrets affected all the characters' lives. There was so much that the characters didn't know about each other, even those who were supposedly really close. Once the story got going, I found that I couldn't stop reading because I wanted to see what was going to happen next.

I have never read or seen Doctor Zhivago, but I'm thinking that maybe I should do one or both after reading this book.

The Secrets We Kept is published by Knopf and is on bookstore shelves now. I received a free ARC o the book at BookCon.