Book Reviews
Bohjalian, a seasoned pro, lucidly handles the back-and-forth chronology as successive narrators give their different perspectives on the same events, and he skillfully plants clues ... that carefully lead to a shocking final plot twist, though they cannot make it persuasive.... Trying to fold a serious subject into a commercially palatable format, Secrets of Eden is readable and fitfully insightful, but never truly illuminating.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Superbly written - vivid and horrifying without being melodramatic....a tribute to Bohjalian's storytelling skill.
Boston Globe
end. . .Bohjalian's book is about the power of secrets and sacrifice and a warning against jumping to judgment. Those who doubt their faith, he writes, are sometimes the strongest among us.
Amy Driscoll - Miami Herald
Page-turning.... Bohjalian has a knack for creating nuanced, detailed first-person female characters.... Secrets of Eden speeds along pleasingly as both thriller and character study.
Seattle Times
Superb... Fans of Bohjalian's 11 other novels (including Midwives) know to expect the unexpected and, thanks to his creativity and cunning, readers usually get walloped by one heck of a plot twist by book's end. In Secrets of Eden, the old saw that none of us knows what really goes on in a house when the shades are drawn rings chillingly true.
Carol Memmott - USA Today
Chris Bohjalian has always known how to keep the pages turning. In his latest novel, a small Vermont hamlet has been racked by a well-established couple's apparent murder-suicide. Bohjalian describes the aftermath of that ruinous night in varied voices, effortlessly slipping into the heads of the shaken local pastor, the no-nonsense deputy state attorney, and the best-selling author whose own past draws her to the scene of the crime.... [A] study of guilt and grief.
Entertainment Weekly
Bohjalian has built a reputation on his rich characters and immersing readers in diverse subjects—homeopathy, animal rights activism, midwifery—and his latest surely won’t disappoint. The morning after her baptism into the Rev. Stephen Drew’s Vermont Baptist church, Alice Hayward and her abusive husband are found dead in their home, an apparent murder-suicide. Stephen, the novel’s first narrator, is so racked with guilt over his failure to save Alice that he leaves town. Soon, he meets Heather Laurent, the author of a book about angels whose own parents’ marriage also ended in tragedy. Stephen’s deeply sympathetic narration is challenged by the next two narrators: deputy state attorney Catherine Benincasa, whose suspicions are aroused initially by Stephen’s abrupt departure (and then by questions about his relationship with Alice), and Heather, who distances herself from Stephen for similar reasons and risks the trip into her dark past by seeking out Katie, the Haywards’ now-orphaned 15-year-old daughter who puts into play the final pieces of the puzzle, setting things up for a touching twist. Fans of Bohjalian’s more exotic works will miss learning something new, but this is a masterfully human and compassionate tale.
Publishers Weekly
While stylistically reminiscent of his earlier best seller, Midwives, Bohjalian's 13th novel is his most splendid accomplishment to date. The story revolves around the apparent murder-suicide of Alice and George Hayward and its toll on the couple's teenage daughter Katie, the lost faith of Rev. Stephen Drew, and the minister's relationship with an author of books about angels. As the narrative takes its turn through a series of voices, Bohjalian wends his way through the reader's mind, toying with perceptions, trust, and doubt. Did George in fact kill himself after strangling his wife? As lives are dissected, relationships are uncovered and their repercussions hypothesized and echoed. Verdict: A fantastic choice for book clubs, this novel deals beautifully with controversial topics of domestic abuse, faith, and adultery without resorting to sensationalism. Fans of Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve will enjoy this breathtaking piece of fiction.
Library Journal
Bohjalian returns with a story of violence. Part I opens with the first-person testimony of Stephen Drew, minister to a Baptist congregation in Haverill, Vt., that includes Alice Hayward, whose husband George tops off years of beatings by strangling her after dinner on the day she chose to be baptized. It quickly becomes clear that Stephen and Alice had been lovers, and the weirdly distanced description of the guilt he feels about her death is creepy even before we realize that George may not have shot himself after killing his wife, and Stephen is the top suspect in the eyes of deputy state's attorney Catherine Benincasa. The narration of Part II is problematic; while Stephen is arrogant and self-absorbed, Catherine is vengefully obsessed with the violence against women she sees in her work. The portrait of the Hayward marriage that emerges from both accounts is grimly predictable (angry, controlling man; passive, isolated woman). The novel improves dramatically with the narration in Part III of Heather Laurent, author of bestselling books about angels who has a brief affair with Stephen in the aftermath of Alice's murder. Heather's father killed her mother and then himself when she was 14, and she thinks she can help both Stephen and 15-year-old Katie Hayward, Alice and George's daughter, deal with their trauma. Heather's depiction of her parents' marriage has the specificity and complexity missing from the collage portrait of the Haywards, though her fixation on angels never amounts to anything more than a fictional device. Part IV, narrated by Katie, has a somber power as the girl imagines her parents' last hours. A schematic tale of battered wives, murderous husbands and the consequences for their traumatized daughters.
Kirkus Reviews