Keeping Secrets

What’s a nice Southern Jewish girl like Emma Fine doing married to an angry but beautiful and incredibly sexy black artist like Jesse Tree?

Emma Tree’s marriage is falling apart. Jesse’s obsession with Skytop, the old inn he’s renovating, pulls him further away from her, and the distance forces Emma into some uneasy questions about their relationship and about herself. She packs her bags and travels home to Louisiana, to a family she loves but barely knows. And the answers she finds along the way help solve the puzzles that have haunted her all her life.

Before Emma’s mother Helen died, she made her husband Jake Fine promise to look after the baby should anything happen to Helen. After her death, Jake left his Baltimore home to travel to West Cypress, Louisiana, where a new wife was waiting. For Rosalie Norris, Emma was a dream come true. Emma is a right and precocious child, but by the time she’s a teenager, she has outgrown the old-fashioned provincialism of West Cypress and Rosalie’s stiflingly overprotective and obsessive love.

While teaching in California, Emma meets and eventually marries Jesse Tree. Theirs is a passionate and loving relationship despite the vast differences between them. It’s a secret Emma must keep from her family, but it’s nothing compared to the secrets they’ve kept hidden from Emma all these years.

Sarah Shankman has written a hauntingly touching and darkly funny novel about the long-time coming of age of a 30-year-old woman in search of the truth about who she is, where she comes from, and where she’s going. It’s a story about the secrets of the past and how they determine the future, and a love story about two people from completely different worlds who meet, fall in love, collide, and crash—sending off sparks that neither of them, nor the readers who come to love them, will ever forget.

QUOTES

“In Keeping Secrets Sarah Shankman has created a character as wise and wonderfully funny as Fear of Flying’s Isadora Wing. This is a brilliant book, beautifully written, which reinforces with a spellbinding story what I’ve always known about Southern women: Keep your eye on them. They’ll blindside you with their bravery and slamdunk your heart.”
Pat Conroy
The Prince of Tides

“Holly Golightly, turn in your jersey. Here comes Emma Tree. Keeping Secrets is a wonderment, a subtle earthy, joyous, darkling journey through a bright country, in which a fragmented and most appealing Southern girl sets out to discover herself and finds a woman of enormous richness, complexity, and wholeness. In Impersonal Attractions, Sarah Shankman showed us she has a near-perfect ear and eye for the contemporary dilemma. In Keeping Secrets, she proves—magnificently—that she also has the heart for it.”
Anne Rivers Siddons
Heartbreak Hotel