Want to Know a Secret? By Freida McFadden

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into the second book I’ve checked out from the very popular Freida McFadden Want to Know a Secret?  The last book I checked out of Frieda’s One by One I really enjoyed so I was excited to check out more of her work. Want to Know a Secret? was definitely a great pick to check out next in her work and definitely made me want to check out more of her work in the future. So, let’s get into it!

Main Characters:

• April: A baking youtuber who while once popular in her neighbourhood starts to notice things changing when Maria and her family move into the neighbourhood, starts to get threatening text messages that make it seem like someone is out to get her but for what reason she doesn’t know
• Elliot and Bobby: Elliot is April’s husband who turns out to have some interesting skeletons in his closet, and Bobby is their son, it seems like Maria and Julie’s sons are out to make his life a living hell
• Maria, Sean and Owen: The new neighbours to this very drama-filled real housewives-style neighbourhood, Maria seems to be possessive over her husband for some reason, and their son is a bit of an odd kid
• Julie and Leo: Julie is April’s best friend but the two don’t really seem like friends, Julie gives off very much Karen vibes in her obsessive ways she tries to control the neighbourhood, Leo is her son who is Bobby’s age

My Review

Want to Know a Secret? by Freida McFadden is a twisty mystery thriller that keeps you guessing non-stop. This is only the second book of Freida’s that I have checked out, but damn that woman has a talent for making a twisty mystery with an ending that you don’t see coming at all. Having checked out One by One by her before I really enjoyed the characters and the plot, and found that this book has a lot of similar strengths.

I gave Want to Know a Secret? a 9/10 rating. I really enjoyed the book and once I started it found it very hard to put down. It’s not a very long book and is a bit more fast-paced. It’s a really good weekend read that you can finish out in a few days, and that’s a good thing because I guarantee once you start you won’t want to put it down either.

I can’t get too much into the plot because once I do I would start to spoil things, so I get more into some of the characters in that area. The book is a majority from the perspective of April, an extremely insecure stay-at-home mom who busies herself during the day by running a YouTube channel where she bakes and shares recipes. I say that April is insecure because early into the book it becomes clear that she is desperate to be liked by everyone and values her worth based off of what others think of her. To put it bluntly, she’s a bit of a cringy try-hard. If anything though these aspects about her made me feel for her, and kind of pity her. Despite her many attempts to have others like her it never works out, and I couldn’t help but feel bad for her. Her husband Elliot is not present in their marriage at all, but it also seems like April isn’t either. Even though their marriage isn’t great she still tries to present this image like everything in her life is perfect.

April’s facade comes crumbling down when she starts to receive anonymous texts from someone who is clearly watching her, and is also hell-bent on ruining her life. This threatens to cause everything that April has created to potentially be destroyed, so she is desperate to figure out who is trying to ruin her image and why. The characters in this book are a little bit predictable and cheesy but this was a factor in Freida’s other book that I noticed that I personally liked quite a bit. When it comes to doing what I call clique characters it’s either good or bad. The bad thing sometimes with clique characters is that it’s too clear what role each character in the book is there to play, ultimately giving things away. While I did have my different suspicions about things in the book I was never really right. The reason for that is while the characters are a bit clique and do have a distinctive role in the book, none of them are particularly good people. While April was very easy to be sympathetic with there were things about her that definitely made me raise a brow. This meant that it was hard to tell who was sending the texts and why because there was a decent amount of people to choose from for various different reasons.

I thought Maria and her family were very interesting characters in the book. While Maria and her family’s presence stirs up a lot in the book I would argue that she was the least weird or suspicious in the book. I had a hard time telling if she was really as sneaky as April would make her seem throughout the book if it was April’s paranoia getting the best of her on things. I feel like the topic of mental health came up for me personally multiple times in this book. It seemed like all of these different women were just desperate to be the best one out of all of them and I couldn’t help but kind of feel a little bad for everyone. It was clear everyone had their issues I guess it was just a question of who had more than the others.

Once everything in this book started to unravel I was defiantly shocked. I totally did not see the ending coming and the way it played out was definitely a shocker as well. It was definitely a bit far-fetched but personally, I liked it and it left the reader with a few more questions than they came up with. I liked that this book made you question and analyze every character in it. It was hard to tell at points in the book if April was telling the truth or just trying to boast herself up, and further it was hard to tell her if her perspectives on people were accurate.

If you’re a Frieda McFadden fan or love a good thriller I would definitely recommend checking this one out.

*** Beware spoilers ahead***

As I said before there are so many twists in this book that I hope I don’t forget any here, but Freida had me fooled the whole time.

The biggest thing in my opinion that gets exposed in the book is that the majority perspective we get from April in the book may not be the most accurate ones. In the last few hundred pages of the book, we get a perspective from Julie. Throughout the book, April presents Julie as insanely rude and stuck-up. Julie was presented as a woman who enjoyed crushing other people’s souls with her power. It turns out that April may have seen Julie this way because Julie was a threat to her. Julie is an incredibly smart, hardworking, well-spoken, and confident woman. In shorter terms, she is everything April is not. When Julie moved into the neighbourhood years before Maria April instantly wanted to befriend her, in the hopes of Julie not figuring out how she is. To put it bluntly again April is very mentally unwell. Now this definitely does not excuse her from what she goes on to do in the book, but the woman is incredibly unstable. Anything that threatens to destroy the perfect life she wants others to think she has, she will destroy it instead. The perspective we get from April in the book is the opposite of what is really going on pretty much. It’s almost as if she lies to herself to make her delusions more real.

The thing is the text messages that April gets are very real. When Julie’s perspective comes into play we find out that it’s her sending the messages. Due to her past working as a lawyer Julie quickly figures out that everything that April is, is a lie. When Julie meets April’s mother for the first time soon into their friendship, they go to the care home she staying in for Alzheimer’s. When Julie and April’s mother are alone her mother says some weird things that raise some red flags. After doing some digging and calling some old friends she realizes that Elliot’s old secretary died in odd circumstances, and based on what her mother had said in a medicated haze, she was not suffering from Alzheimer’s April had forced her to be there after buying some people off in fear she would go back on being April’s alibi for the night the secretary dies. Julie doesn’t have any way to prove it but she is certain April killed her. After some time Julie becomes frustrated with April’s ability to put on this mask and hide who she really is and starts sending the text messages. Things however get very out of hand quick and when she realizes that April thinks Maria is sending the messages she has to figure out what to do.

The issue however lands right on her doorstep when April discovers that her husband has done what he did again and has been sleeping with his new secretary Brianna. Not only has he been sleeping with her but Brianna is pregnant and Elliot is desperate to get away from his unpredictable wife and start a new life. April isn’t about to let that happen. When Brianna shows up dead not long after April finds out what’s going on Julie knows it was April and has to do something about it. When Julie sees April breaking into Maria’s house, most likely in an attempt to hurt her she goes over there to stop it. Julie can get Maria to safety and stops April, ending with her being arrested and in jail. April claims that she killed the first secretary Courtney but not the second, but I initially just assumed she was lying.

The big twist at the end is we find out that April really didn’t kill Brianna. Her mother did. After finding a way to stay off of the meds that made her a zombie for a few days she made plans to sneak out of the care home and kill her daughter. Feeling like the only way she could escape the grasp of her daughter was killing her she made a plan. What she hadn’t expected however was a woman very similar to April just younger would be leaving an area that she thought April would be in. Going back to the care home April’s mother truly believed that she killed her daughter. The book ends with police coming to ask her if she knew anything about her daughter killing Brianna, not if she lied about the old alibi like she was expecting. So it leaves the reader with a few more questions than we came to. Will April take the fall for everything? Will Julie ever realize that April didn’t do it all? I mean dang does it even really matter? I mean April seemed pretty terrible overall, but a part of me was left wondering if maybe her mom was really the one with the issues, but that didn’t fully make sense. I mean why would she go on this thing about not wanting to lie for her anymore if that wasn’t true? Defiantly filled with lots of twists and turns that’s for sure.

I definitely did not see this ending coming. I was fully convinced that maybe Maria was a secret crazy person, or Julie was putting her rage that April presented into different forms, but in the end, it seemed that it was really April that was the issue.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Have you read Want to Know a Secret? by Freida McFadden before? What did you think?

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