Game of Secrets

Oct 15, 2011 by Keetha DePriest

Small towns have long memories. I grew up in a small town and now live in one. Despite the years and the miles that separate the two places, the towns are a lot alike in that the stories these places hold are as prevalent as any landmark. But what happens when the history you know to be certain is anything but?

It’s an unspoken truth that Luce Weld was sleeping with Ada Varick. When Luce went missing and his skull was later found with a bullet hole in it, common knowledge found that Ada’s jealous husband had done it.

Jane Weld, who was a child of eleven when her father, Luce, went missing in 1957, plays Scrabble with Ada Varick every Friday. Odd bedfellows, for sure. The games are uneventful until Jane’s daughter, Marne, begins a romance with Ada’s son, Ray.

In the same way that a simple word on the Scrabble board becomes a more complex, longer word by the careful placement of a few tiles, so does the very game become loaded with meaning. Week by week, words are literally spelled out before the two women on the worn game board. The existing undercurrent of tension builds, unasked questions are answered, and secrets are slowly and thrillingly laid bare.

Game of Secrets is part mystery, part thriller, part love story, and a brilliant metaphor on the game of Scrabble, all the while probing the question: What do we really know about the history we’ve grown up knowing about our family? What do we really know about each other?

I don’t go for subtlety mostly because I tend to be literal. I miss the forest for the trees, so I don’t like things to be danced around and hinted at. Yet I also don’t like to be insulted as a reader and have something spelled out for me in blaring neon letters. Contradictory? You bet.

Game of Secrets struck a just-right balance. The Scrabble game as metaphor was pitch-perfect, not heavy-handed or overly clever, which make it exactly unboxed.

When she began writing the book, Dawn Tripp had four pieces: an actual story of a bullet-pierced skull found at a gravel fill, and images of a 14-year-old kid driving too fast down a rural highway; lovers meeting in an old cranberry barn; and two women playing Scrabble. From there came the book that author Caroline Leavitt calls “An unusual love story melded to a literary thriller, and filled with exquisite language and dazzlingly alive characters…”

The author walks the reader through the story, letting time cascade forward and backward, as we see what happened through several points of view. Dawn Tripp writes beautifully of people stuck not only in but also by the past. Game of Secrets illustrates how much of the present can be shaped by the past.

From the book’s synopsis:

Now, half a century later, Jane is still searching for the truth of her father’s death, a mystery made more urgent by the unexpected romance that her willful daughter, Marne, has struck up with one of Ada’s sons. As the love affair intensifies, Jane and Ada meet for their weekly Friday game of Scrabble, a pastime that soon transforms into a cat-and-mouse game of words left long unspoken, and dark secrets best left untold.

Game of Secrets is an eerie and unforgettable story of how past hurts are never past and how sometimes what we know to be the truth isn’t the truth at all.

Overall rating: ★★★★★★

Unboxed rating: ★★★★★★

Keetha DePriest loves the small southern town that nourishes her and her family, and is grateful that through books, she can visit Paris or New York or Brakebills Academy, exploring other worlds, lives and ideas. Keetha is the author of two books about cooking and is working on her second novel. She rarely watches TV as that would take time away from reading books.

Keetha DePriest

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