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Lara Prescott
Positive The Austin Chronicle The sisterhood that Prescott initiates the reader into in this Cold War story, at once workaday and mythic, is one you\'re loath to leave even when the story has come to its close ... There\'s a discretion Prescott maintains throughout The Secrets We Kept, perhaps appropriate given the work and circumstances of her protagonists – she never prescribes an absolute truth when she can give you the big picture and the stories that gently contradict one another and let the reader draw their own conclusion instead. There\'s readerly pleasure in being trusted to have a keen eye and considerable storytelling strength in the approach as well ... There\'s a lot endured by the women of The Secrets We Kept – professional disrespect, governmental menace, sexual assault, all on top of the indignity of their accomplishments being swept under the rug – but astonishingly, this isn\'t a novel as bleak as a Russian winter. Hope isn\'t something anyone comes by lightly, Prescott suggests – its maintenance requires imagination, fortitude, and enduring love – but she\'s assembled a group of heroines with all three in spades.
Casey Cep
Rave The Austin Chronicles ...[a] stunning first book ... This immersive and precise look at a 1977 Alabama murder and the reclusive writer who almost penned a book about it doesn\'t devote even one of its three sections to Robert Burns, the man at the heart of the titular trial...then to author Harper Lee ... Thoroughness may not, at first glance, seem like the sexiest trait, but throughout her debut, Cep\'s intellectual curiosity is infectious. Under her guidance, tracing the history of life insurance from the Great Fire of London to the U.S. in the 1970s doesn\'t just seem necessary to understanding why and how Maxwell may have bumped off his family members, but also deeply, genuinely fun. There\'s something egalitarian in the way Cep dispenses information, something joyful in the way she executes deep dives, and always with a keen eye for how the weight of history acts on her subjects and her audience ... Cep has no simple solution to offer us, but her rich look at a moment in the criminal justice system of the American South, Lee\'s complicated life, and a frank wrestling with the work of writing is just as satisfying.