50 in 2012: Book Forty One

These Girls by Sarah Pekkanen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A tale of the ways secrets can envelope all aspects of your life just as you think you’ve got them all covered up. You can’t escape them. They are engrained in your being and manage to escape when you least expect them…

Three women living together in New York City. Three women harboring secrets that they think they’ve hidden in the deepest crevices of their being; however, the secrets affect their daily actions, thoughts, and choices more than they know.

Cate: successful, driven, and independent. Yet, she maintains a wall and distance from her roommates. She wants more but doesn’t know how to go about it. She ran away from something life altering, escaping to New York City. No one knows why. She desperately longs to tell her story but fears the repercussions.

Renee: loyal and hardworking, she struggles to fit in a career built upon perfection. She wouldn’t call herself fat by any means, but she certainly isn’t the industry standard size four. As she pursues a job opening as a beauty editor, she finds herself secretly attempting to lose weight at all costs.

Abby: caring, nurturing, and mysterious, she comes to the roommates as the sister of a friend in need of a place to stay. Clearly disheveled and troubled, the women try to figure out what happened to Abby to cause her to drop everything and run…to New York City.

Bound by secrets they don’t know exist, each woman longs for love and acceptance in her own way. The women open up and expose secrets that reveal tragedy, heartache, and raw honesty. I thought this book would be a light, chick lit read but the struggles and challenges each woman faced were so poignantly real that I still think about each of them and wonder what they are doing today. The ways in which each woman’s secrets are so firmly entangled in the lives of those around them is incredibly thought provoking and makes me wonder what the secrets are of those I see as strangers on the street…you never know the battles another is facing or the burdens they carry.