One thing about touchstones, I suppose, is that - probably by definition - you see elements of them everywhere, and maybe even sometimes when the connection is faint at best. Be that as it may, The Secret Place, which I enjoyed a lot, for me summoned to mind both The Virgin Suicides and The Secret History (two of the very biggest for me).
The funny thing is that The Secret Place sets up as (and is) a piece of genre fiction, and namely crime - a genre that's always been more or less outside my interests but tends to intersect incidentally with my reading anyway.
The apparent supernatural elements are risky, but they're important to the novel's effect and they work - adding to the air of mystery as well as the intense focus on the heightened nature of the girls' friendship and insularity of feelings, coming off as at least plausibly an entirely inter-subjective mass hallucination, as well as being a kind of experience that exists naturally on a continuum with the intensity with which they respond to their evening excursions to the hidden grove (a secret place of another kind).
In any case, it's pretty terrific, with the suspense building nicely across the two timelines playing out in alternating chapters - detective Stephen Moran's investigation of the year old murder of schoolboy Chris Harper on the grounds of exclusive Irish girls school St Kilda's, and the unfolding narrative that year previously from the perspective of the four girls - close friends - who emerge as suspects and prove to have plenty of unplumbed depths and internal corkscrew twists in their individual and collective psyches: Holly Mackey, Julia Harte, Selena Wynne and Becca O'Mara ... as well as the other clique (Joanne Heffernan et al). Works as both a mystery and, just as satisfyingly, as an examination of a time of life, a particular place, and the working through of a whole set of characters and personalities.
The funny thing is that The Secret Place sets up as (and is) a piece of genre fiction, and namely crime - a genre that's always been more or less outside my interests but tends to intersect incidentally with my reading anyway.
The apparent supernatural elements are risky, but they're important to the novel's effect and they work - adding to the air of mystery as well as the intense focus on the heightened nature of the girls' friendship and insularity of feelings, coming off as at least plausibly an entirely inter-subjective mass hallucination, as well as being a kind of experience that exists naturally on a continuum with the intensity with which they respond to their evening excursions to the hidden grove (a secret place of another kind).
In any case, it's pretty terrific, with the suspense building nicely across the two timelines playing out in alternating chapters - detective Stephen Moran's investigation of the year old murder of schoolboy Chris Harper on the grounds of exclusive Irish girls school St Kilda's, and the unfolding narrative that year previously from the perspective of the four girls - close friends - who emerge as suspects and prove to have plenty of unplumbed depths and internal corkscrew twists in their individual and collective psyches: Holly Mackey, Julia Harte, Selena Wynne and Becca O'Mara ... as well as the other clique (Joanne Heffernan et al). Works as both a mystery and, just as satisfyingly, as an examination of a time of life, a particular place, and the working through of a whole set of characters and personalities.
