Deep Secrets by Nikki Shannon Smith

In 1929 New York City, at the beginning of the Great Depression, 19-year-old Colette is a “prisoner in her own home” like “a porcelain doll, put on a shelf and left to collect dust.” To make matters worse, she’s haunted nightly by terrifying dreams of icy water, darkness, being suspended above the earth, and people screaming.

Colette lives with her older sister, younger brother, and their French-born mother, whom they call Maman. She told her children that their father died in a factory accident when Colette was 2 years old. No pictures of him grace their home, and the children have been told not to speak of him.

Maman has warned Colette since she was a young girl that she is sickly and must not interact with the outside world. Only once a week is Colette allowed to walk to Walter’s Market, purchase groceries for her financially struggling family, and come directly home. Colette knows that Maman never has enough cash to cover the bill and that Walter is gracious in allowing their debt to accumulate.

One day when Colette enters the market, Walter is crying by the counter as his employee, a young man named Claude, looks on helplessly. Colette doesn’t know how to react. But Walter sets her at ease by telling her the reason for his tears—today would have been his older brother William’s birthday, but William died 17 years ago when the Titanic sank.

Colette is inexplicably drawn to Walter’s story. She wants to learn more about the mighty ship that was mistakenly considered unsinkable. She devises a plan to volunteer at Walter’s Market to pay off Maman’s debt so she can be near Walter and ask him to tell her more about what happened on the Titanic. Besides, it would be pleasant to be near Claude, whom she senses is kind and interested in her, though she’s never had contact with a young man before. Each day when Maman and Colette’s siblings go to work, she sneaks out of the house to the market and hurries home before they return from work.

As Colette and Claude listen to Walter’s tale, told over a period of a few weeks, Colette becomes increasingly confused. Why does it seem as if Walter and Claude are keeping secrets from her? And why, when she ultimately presses Walter to tell her the truth she so badly longs to hear, does he say, “I’m going to tell you the truth, before the lies destroy us all. But I must warn you that the truth may also destroy us all.”

Author Nikki Shannon Smith skillfully weaves together the history of the sinking of Titanic and the trauma of the Great Depression while narrating a tender love story, exposing the racial discrimination that bedeviled both events, and emphasizing the destructive power of telling lies and the liberating complexities of unearthing the truth.

Though recommended for ages 9-12, the book is better suited to ages 12 and older. (Scholastic)