A Secret Word

FROM THE PUBLISHER

chosen for If All Arkansas Read the Same Book for 2004

"Jennifer Paddock's novel spans fifteen years in the lives of friends Leigh, Sarah, and Chandler, beginning one fateful day in high school that forever connects them. While Leigh remains stuck in dead-in jobs in their Arkansas hometown, the more privileged Sarah and Chandler move to Manhattan, where Sarah seeks acting fame and Chandler struggles to make sense of her failed relationships, only to be sent reeling by an unexpected tragedy." Sweeping from the Deep South to New York and interweaving each girl's distinctive voice into a seamless narrative, A Secret Word is a story of friendship and family, sex and secrets, growing up and growing apart. It is about how well you can ever really know another person and the secrets we keep from our friends, our families, and, most important, ourselves.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Paddock's striking debut is an intricately balanced story of three girls from Fort Smith, Ark., linked for life by a high school tragedy. In 1986, tennis and country club pals Sarah and Chandler hitch a ride to lunch from the less privileged Leigh; they're pursued by footballer Trey, who crashes his car and dies. Flash forward to 1990: Chandler and Sarah have gone to college; Leigh stays behind to work at a dry cleaner's. But their paths continue to intersect, and Paddock follows her characters through 15 years as they peel apart and reunite, capturing each of the young women in separate first-person chapters. Chandler-introspective, loyal and passionate-moves to New York to go to law school, but loses her way after the death of her financially troubled father. Leigh is still in Fort Smith, her drunken, promiscuous mother a source of embarrassment. She goes on to work at the local grocery store and marries a local boy, though she's never quite content with the smallness of her life. Rich, stunning Sarah moves to New York in Chandler's wake to make it as an actress (though, as her acting coach tells her, she's a better tennis player than thespian). Supported by her father's money, she develops a mild cocaine habit and leans on Chandler for friendship and constancy. Paddock dances between characters and years, tracing her protagonists' tortured and happy relationships, their anguish and confusion and eventually the strength that comes to each. This is a subtle, surprising first novel, with unforgettable characters, a quiet sense of place and a nuanced exploration of the secrets, loves, despairs, friends and relatives that shape our lives. (Apr. 5) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Uncommonly assured debut about three girls united by a shared tragedy who head off into the world only to find their lives on strangely parallel courses. Fort Smith, Arkansas (also the author's hometown), is pretty much like any other small burg: everybody knows everybody's else's business, and while most teenagers can't wait to get out of the place, many soon come orbiting back like errant satellites. Storywriter Paddock focuses on three such teenaged girls with travel itches to scratch, tracking them from 1986 to 2001. Chandler and Sarah are tighter friends and move in more rarified circles than working-class Leigh, but the three are nevertheless bonded for life in tenth grade, when an off-campus lunch trip results in Chandler's boyfriend dying in a car crash. In separate first-person chapters, Paddock jumps among the trio in the years afterward as the trust fund-enabled Chandler and Sarah saunter off to sample the opportunities in New York while Leigh is stuck working minimum-wage jobs back in Fort Smith. At first, it seems the author is giving decent, generous Leigh short shrift, preferring instead to revel in the glamorous exploits of jet-setting Sarah and morose but similarly silver-spooned Chandler. But once Chandler is brought low by a family tragedy and unexpectedly helped through it by Leigh, who has been an elusive presence in her more privileged friends' lives since high school, the tables are somewhat turned. Paddock's narrative is deceptively simple. Her characters neither implausibly obsess over minutiae nor have conveniently placed dramatic episodes; instead, their creator relies on a smoothly authoritative voice to simply carry us through. An unusually generous spiritanimates these pages, knowledgeable about shared pain, the call of the big city, disappointments, and secret keeping. Nobody is spared, but no one is punished, either. Reads less like a novel than the lucky discovery of three secret diaries. Agent: Michelle Tessler/Carlisle & Co.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Jay McInerney

A Secret Word is a remarkably subtle and nuanced coming of age novel which captures the dreamy rhythms of adolescence between staccato moments of crisis as three perfectly ordinary and utterly memorable young southern women find themselves transported inexorably into the cosmopolitan landscape of womanhood. While many first novelists wave their arms and stamp their feet to get our attention, Jennifer Paddock seduces the reader with the narrative equivalent of a raised eyebrow or the almost imperceptible nod of the head. At the end the reader is inclined to ask of the writer as well as her characters--what's next? — author of Bright Lights, Big City

William Gay

Poignant and true, Paddock's language evokes the elegiac way lives play themselves out. Her characters are vividly alive, for she writes with her heart as well as her hands. — author of I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down

Melinda Haynes

A Secret Word is a rare gem of a book, distilled and heartbreaking, yet full of quiet grace that illuminates the page in extraordinary ways. There is something about Paddock's writing that defies conventional description. The closest word I can summon is 'magic. — author of Mother of Pearl and Willem's Field

Michael Knight

Jennifer Paddock has written a perfect novel-in-stories. A Secret Word is whole in a way that most of the kind are not; it resonates. That's partly because the three women at the center of the story are so memorable, their lives so inexorably linked, and partly because Paddock writes like Raymond Carver with a bigger heart--simple, graceful but tough, always with an eye on the possibilty of redemption. — author of Goodnight, Nobody

Amanda Eyre Ward