Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret Book Review

Can You Keep A Secret?

By Sophie Kinsella

Published by The Dial Press, 2004

368 pages

Happiness is finding a book you literally cannot put down. Further happiness involves said book making you laugh until tears squeeze out of the corners of your eyes while you read it at the doctor’s office, to the point that other patients are trying to get a glimpse of the cover, so they can see what’s so damn funny. Such was my happiness the other day when I grabbed a pink-covered hardbook thingy I picked up at Goodwill months ago. It was placed on the table when I brought it home, moved to the chair, dropped to the floor, and gradually migrated its way under the couch. With greatest of luck, my new puppy (and I will certainly review her when the time is right) snuffled it out and I picked it up. From that point on, there was no putting it down. GLUED to the sucker, I tell you.

Can You Keep a Secret? Is what I would call a “gem”. If I could have it set in gold and wear it as a necklace on happy days, I would certainly do so. This story made me laugh out loud- yes! No joke, I was LOLing all day long.

Basic breakdown- on a plane going through considerable turbulence, Emma believes she is going to die. Does she pray? No. Does she scream? Nope. Does she curse the heavens and struggle for life? Not exactly. Instead, she turns to her seatmate, a perfect stranger, and proceeds to tell him all of her secrets.

Yes all of them, even ones about weight, clothing sizes, and the lying involved therein.

Which would be all well and good, were she actually about to die, and the stranger with her. But…you can see where this is going…. She doesn’t die. Survives admirably, in fact, and manages to get off the plane with life and limb intact, mortified that she’s told a complete stranger all of the intimate details of her sex life ( like the fact that her boyfriend is boring in bed and couldn’t find a G-spot if he were given a map and headlamp.) yet relieved that she will never have to see the dude again.

Guess what?

Oh dang, you guessed. She does indeed see him again. At work. In the capacity of… well, sort of her boss.

It is British humor at its finest (Think Bridget Jones) and Emma is neurotic and delightful and frustratingly dense at times, but that’s sort of the fun of this kind of book… you get to be glad you’re not her, and at the same time wish you were. I love British authors, and Irish ones too come to think of it, they have such a marvelous way with words, and the slang is like nothing we ever say in our day to day lives here in the United States of bad grammah. I liked this one so much, it’s going onto the Shelf of All Shelves- that’s right, the Keeper Shelf… and I’m off to Amazon to buy everything else she has ever written.

I give it a red on the Reading Rainbow.