This book is part of the Secrets series, which are seven books written by seven different authors about the aftermath of a fire that burns down the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls and the outcomes of the seven oldest girls there. I’m not sure about you, but that sounds like a pretty great idea for a book series.

In this book, we follow Dot as she tries to figure out who her birth parents are.

The book has a great mystery to follow and a decent amount of suspense. The plot was very good. Mostly, the thing that made this difficult for me to read was that I didn’t really like the main character. For a lot of the novel, she comes off as a bit whiny. Now I understand that having the home you grew up in burn down and being forced to go off into the world on your own is a pretty valid thing to complain about. But she really doesn’t complain about that very much. She just whines about the boy she likes and obsessively things about him all the time. She admits to being a daydreamer, but at times this becomes repetitive and does not advance the plot (fantasizing about telling her friends at the home about the boy she met). At times this even gets in the way of the plot as she’s so busy thinking about this boy, that she completely overlooks important clues (like the bones at her door which are placed there multiple times and she hardly notices).

The book was a little slow to start out and it didn’t really pick up until about halfway through. But I think figuring out the mystery of her birth parents was very interesting as she tries to piece everything together. It was well written with a good amount of detail. Many of the chapters are fairly short so it is a pretty quick read, especially once the plot gets going.