Open Secret by JohnsonThis review is a guest review writ­ten by fel­low reader, Senetra.

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I chose to read Open Secret (2006) by Jan­ice Kay John­son, one of my auto-buy authors. This is the first book in a tril­ogy about sib­lings sep­a­rated by adop­tion fol­low­ing their par­ents’ deaths in a car accident.

I started to read the book and was imme­di­ately con­fused by the mus­ings of Suzanne as she com­pared her lawn to that of Tom’s, her uptight neigh­bor. The back blurb listed Car­rie as the hero­ine, and P.I. Mark as the hero. Suzanne actu­ally hires Mark to find her siblings.

The first one he finds is Carrie/Linette, who was adopted as an infant and was never told of her adop­tion. Carrie’s par­ents are a sur­geon and a nurse, and they were in their 40’s and 50’s when they were finally able to adopt. As she grew up, Car­rie always felt slightly out of step with her par­ents, not as smart or focused.

She actu­ally got a degree in nurs­ing, but gave it up after real­iz­ing she could not bear the some­times gory aspects of the job, and she didn’t like being sub­servient to the doc­tors and other nurses, and now works as an edi­tor of med­ical tech­ni­cal manuals.

Mark is a wid­ower with an adopted son, and his agency spe­cial­izes in reunited birth par­ents and chil­dren. His wife died try­ing to give birth to “a child of her own” because she wanted to expe­ri­ence preg­nancy and child­birth and even admit­ted to him that she didn’t feel an adopted child was not the same.

So Mark has issues, and is not inter­ested in a rela­tion­ship even though he is attracted to Car­rie. Hav­ing seen many birth fam­ily reunions, he is aware of the emo­tional roller­coaster Car­rie is about to expe­ri­ence, and doesn’t want to get involved, but they begin dat­ing anyway.

When Car­rie finds out she’s adopted, she spends the rest of the book whin­ing about how her par­ents did her wrong, and if she had known she was adopted, she would not have been so eager to fol­low in their footsteps.

Mark spends the rest of the book try­ing to rec­on­cile his feel­ings about his wife and what she did. Suzanne gets nearly as much page time as Car­rie and Mark, intro­duc­ing Car­rie to the rel­a­tives who put her up for adop­tion, plan­ning her new busi­ness, and try­ing to find out about their brother Gary/Lucien.

Mark and Carrie’s rela­tion­ship felt like a few dates, a sex­ual encounter, a con­ver­sa­tion about how spoiled Car­rie is, a break-up, and some I Love Yous at the end. There was very lit­tle actual devel­op­ment of Car­rie as a char­ac­ter; instead, I feel that I know Mark and Suzanne very well, but the amount of back­story and whin­ing took up too much of the plot. Grade C–

This review is apart of the TBR Chal­lenge that we are all par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year. Please make sure to visit the other par­tic­i­pants in this chal­lenge. We try­ing to clear out our TBR piles!

Addi­tional book info for Open Secret by Jan­ice Kay John­son. Pub­lisher: Har­le­quin Pub. Date: March 2006 ISBN-13: 9780373713325 298pp
Series: Har­le­quin Super Romance Series, #1332