The Secret Chord — a thundering, gritty, emotionally devastating reconsideration of the story of King David — makes a masterly case for the generative power of retelling.
Viscerally rich descriptions are not enough to bring a novel to life, and on the whole Brooks' The Secret Chord flails somewhere between history and fiction. Neither entirely convincing nor particularly compelling, Brooks' novel is a prototypical work of historical fiction that falters under the constraints of its own genre.
