Keeping You a Secret by Julie by Anne Peters

I really like it when people recommend books to me that I've never heard of before. It's nice to open the front cover and have nothing to go on but the title and author's name — which, ideally, is as unknown to me as the book itself. Once I had a friend recommend Catch-22 by Joseph Heller followed by him asking me if I'd ever heard of it before. I just lowered my head and shook it slowly. I'm not trying to sound like a snob, but the point of recommending a book is to introduce something new and unheard of to someone. Such was the case with Keeping you a Secret by Julie Anne Peters.

Keeping you a Secret is a novel that follows Holland Jaeger through her final year in high school. Wait! Don't stop reading! I reacted the same way as you probably did: “I'm not so sure a teen fiction book is for me,” but in the spirit of giving something new a chance, I ask you to stick with me.

Holland is going through the typical graduating year drama that every Lindsay Lohan film keeps reminding us of (choosing a college, pressure to succeed, single-parent woes, relationship stuff, whatever) through most of the book. But what the book mostly focuses on is a new student that has come to Holland's school. This student starts flirting with her, in spite of knowing Holland has a boyfriend, and in time Holland actually begins to reciprocate these romantic feelings. The catch-22 (see what I did there?), however, is that this new student is a young lady.

So on top of standard teenage drama, Holland has to figure out if she's gay and, if she is, whether or not she can put up with that in a very homophobic environment. The messages the book tries to get across are quite straightforward: tolerance, respect, honesty, openness, loyalty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Although these are straightforward messages, it doesn't make them less significant. And with what this book is trying to convey, covering a theme up with innuendo and opening them for interpretation may destroy the messages entirely.

Furthermore, the characters are actually a few layers deeper than you'd expect. There are about five-bajillion subplots that are going on at once (true to many real-life high schools), and while they might not all seem necessary, they're not done too badly at all. You won't find someone as deep as Macbeth or Sherlock Holmes in here, but you also won't find Cag the alien brain either.

Keeping you a Secret isn't a perfect book by any means. You don't ever really know how the book will end but you feel like it's predictable; like somehow, you already know the story. Also, it never really feels as if there's something big going on, you either think to yourself, “eh that kinda sucks/that's kinda cool.” You don't actually ever feel like the events are as huge as they probably should feel.

Going back to the five-bajillion subplots that are going on, I haven't really decided exactly how I feel about them. They seem quite superfluous at times. I don't know why I should care that Kirsten and her boyfriend broke up, but I'm told that they did.

A lot of the time these minor events in these minor plots do advance, parallel or say something about the main plot, but at other times it's just hard to care. It could be that the numerous other things going on are designed to simulate a high school environment. If that's the case than I suppose that it's done well — and it could very well be that's what Peters had in mind when writing them — but it's also possible they're used simply for the sake of adding pages to what is a very short novel.

The book is actually very short, and it really shouldn't take more than a few days (or hours, really) to get through. It gets the point across in the short time that it does, but to be honest, in the opening few chapters I feel like I should just be watching Dawson's Creek reruns; I'd be getting the same message. When the plot does start moving, however, it moves at a very appropriate pace that isn't rushed or sloppy.

As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of virtues about the book. When I first was told the title of the book I wasn't sure what I was getting into. It could have been anything from another alien brain invasion to, well, what it is.

With all its flaws, the book is well written and actually pretty good. It could also just be that the flaws speak out more to me than they would to someone that the novel is written for. Seeing that I'm a straight male in college, a book about a sexually confused high school girl isn't exactly the sort of thing I run to the shelves to find. But I can certainly see the value in it.