Life in the Time of COVID-19

A Secret Kept by Tatiana de Rosnay

Tatiana de Rosnay is the author of Sarah’s Key. I am sure many of you have already read Sarah’s Key. A Secret Kept is another novel by her and I found it very engaging. It’s all about complex family relationships and what family doesn’t have complex relationships. Antoine decides to take his sister Mélanie to Noirmoutier Island to celebrate her birthday. This is vacation place they visited when they were children and Antoine had good memories or does he?. Whether good or bad, returning to the island stirs up these memories. The family stopped coming thirty years ago when their young mother died. On the way home from the island they are in a car accident and things started spinning out of control.

Noirmoutier Island is a really interesting place. It is off the west coast of France. The island can only be reached one of two ways; by bridge or via the Passage du Gois, a road that at high tide is entirely submerged. by water. Every May there is a race against the rising tide called the Great Gois Run. Apparently people have lost cars to the rising water or worse been forced to hold onto poles built along the passage waiting for the water to recede or to be rescued. They can literally be hanging onto the poles for dear life for hours.
I almost feel like the island is a character. It is emotionally shut off and so are many of the characters in the book.Going back to this island makes forces Antoine to confront the past and also to confront his troubled relationships with his children, ex-wife and father.

While the book is very dark with death being discussed frequently, I found it very intriguing. De Rosnay is a good writer that guides you through the character’s lives so that you get a good idea of who they are, what they are going through and how they ultimately end up coping. I would like to hear your thoughts about Noirmotier Island and what significance it had in the book.