Review: The Book of Secrets, Elizabeth Joy Arnold

*Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book on Netgalley from the publisher in return for an honest review*

After more than twenty years of marriage, Chloe Sinclair comes home one night to find that her husband, Nate, is gone. All he has left behind is a cryptic note explaining that he’s returned to their childhood town, a place Chloe never wants to see again.

While trying to reach Nate, Chloe stumbles upon a notebook tucked inside his antique copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Written in code, the pages contain long-buried secrets from their past, and clues to why he went home after all these years. As Chloe struggles to decipher the notebook’s hidden messages, she revisits the seminal moments of their youth: the day she met the enigmatic Sinclair children and the increasingly dangerous games they played to escape their troubled childhoods; the first time Nate kissed her, camped out on the beach like Robinson Crusoe; and the elaborate plan she and Nate devised, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to break away from his oppressive father. As the reason for Nate’s absence comes to light, the truth will forever shatter everything Chloe knows—about her husband, his family, and herself

Elizabeth Joy Arnold is also the author of Pieces of My Sister's Life, Promise the Moon, and When We Were Friends. She was raised in New York, and lives with her husband and daughter in Hopewell, New Jersey where she is at work on her next novel.

I love mystery puzzles in my books and it does not happen often that I get to the end of a book more or less to find out I was wrong all the time. This book did have me totally surprised though while it came at the explaining it all part of the book and I was making comments on it out loud.
Chloe is a very vulnerable person. It gets clear from the start that she is not so sure with herself. As soon as she meets the Sinclairs she is impressed by their looks and what they have and she feels she is missing. This feeling just pops of the pages. While she slowly realizes what happens around their house and her feelings are going everywhere you get introduced to the anger and sadness that overwhelm her at points. All these emotions are so strong and so honest that it is easy to see trough Chloe's eyes and be a part of the story.
I loved the part the books played in the book. There where times I felt like grabbing a copy of one of the books used to write the letters to Gabriel and decipher them myself.
I did not like Nate that much. I felt that he has been to secretive, though some parts I did understand that he did not share, and he did not always have a good reason. Even though shaped by his youth I feel Chloe has been a part of his life since their childhood and he knew she knew better.

The Book of Secrets
Author:Elizabeth Joy Arnold
Publisher: Bantam
Pages: 464
Format: eGalley
ISBN-10: 055359253X
ISBN-13: 9780553592535
Publisher: eBook | Paperback

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