MANOR OF BURIED SECRETS

A woman’s death leads a young relative to investigate her final wishes.

Sixteen-year-old Peter Brewer and his extended white South African family are summoned to the manor of his distant—and recently deceased—relation Patricia Woodwright for a “week of remembrance” before the reading of her will. Peter spends this time exploring the manor and nursing a crush on Larissa, who’s Black and white and whose mother and grandmother were close friends of Patricia’s. While having a look around Patricia’s bedroom, Peter and Larissa discover a cache of letters written throughout the 1920s, revealing Patricia’s youthful romance with Mandla, a Zulu employee of her father’s. Their suspicions that Patricia’s true will may be missing lead the duo to investigate further even as Peter attempts to navigate his romantic feelings. Clunky dialogue, overwritten narration, and Peter’s casually misogynistic attitude toward Larissa, which isn’t unpacked in the third-person narration, turn this potentially compelling mystery into a repetitive trundle. The discussions of racial identity and historic and modern racial relations in South Africa are stilted, and readers may be surprised at some of the ignorance the protagonists display of the social and civic status of Black South Africans, given that they were born less than a decade after apartheid ended. While certain clues to the mystery are cleverly laid, the pacing is uneven, with a noticeably rushed ending.

Based on an intriguing premise but fumbles its potential.