Sharon Shinn, The Safe-Keeper's Secret (Viking,
2004)
As summer becomes autumn, a lone rider comes to the home of a village Safe-Keeper, bearing a bundle. The Safe-Keeper, trusted as the holder of the town's secrets, is in labor, and so it is her sister (herself Safe-Keeper for another town) who takes the newborn baby from the King's Safe-Keeper.
For a decade and more, Damiana raises both Reed and Fiona as her own, but the whole town knows that Reed must be the king's bastard son. Fiona wants to be a Safe-Keeper like her mother, even though the Truth-Teller Thomas told her she never will be. Reed, restless as the wind, can never decide or settle on a profession. Their lives start to change when they visit their aunt for a summer, and return to find their mother very ill. The changes won't stop until secrets have been brought to life, truths have been told, and wishes have come true.
Let me clear one thing up right now: this is not a lost-prince fairy tale. It looks like one at first, I know, but keep reading. Reed never expects anything from his presumed father, even though, as any boy would, he dreams of it. Really, though, the book is about his foster-sister Fiona. That she will be Safe-Keeper after her mother is less what she wants than what she expects, and so trains herself for it all her young life.
To the extent that it follows Fiona from the ages of eleven through eighteen (with gaps, of course, this is a fairly short book), it is a coming-of-age story. It deals with her coming to understand people, her struggles with the ethics of a Safe-Keeper (never to tell, no matter how horrible the secret), and the way she finds her own strength.
Honestly, I found the plot a bit predictable. I had most of the plot twists figured out in the first third of the book or so. On the other hand, this is a young adult novel, and I doubt that at 8 or 10 that I'd have worked it out (I was a good bit ahead of the curve, so you can stretch this out a few years for most teens). The predictability didn't bother me, though. It's a good story, and Shinn's style draws the reader in well. There were no parts that didn't strengthen the story, so either Shinn has learned self-selection very well, or has an excellent editor, or both. Structure-wise, the book was tight and clean, with nothing extraneous to bore me.
Shinn's style, as I've said, is engaging, making even characters about whom little detail is given very real, people I could care about. A lot of the minor characters are people with some kind of trouble, the sort of people who need to unburden themselves to someone sworn to keep their secrets. The sorts of secrets they have make them more real than the main characters of at least one book I've read recently.
What I find most interesting about this book is the magic. Magic, here, is not something practiced by wizards, and the village witches are more herb-wives than sorceresses. Instead, magic is something that moves in certain people, and by their hands makes its way into the lives of ordinary people. The Safe-Keepers, with their trees that make no sound at all, have a near-mystical ability to keep silent. A better example is the Truth-Tellers, people who can speak no lies, and to whom truths make themselves apparent, though they have been told by no one. The best example of all, though, is the Dream-Maker (singular, there is only one at a time), an older woman whose life has been a study in tragedy, but who carries in her a power which grants the heart's desire of someone around her. She has no control over this power, but she knows that almost everywhere she goes, she will bring someone happiness.
Another interesting aspect is that Safe-Keeper's Secret becomes, in places, almost a parable about those professions which have an obligation to silence. Doctors, counselors, priests, lawyers, and others all have professional ethics which mandate that they not speak of certain things without their clients', patients', or parishioners' permission. Sometimes that confidence is kept, even when this endangers someone. Sometimes it is broken when it shouldn't be. The question of when to keep silent is very relevant in our world.
This is a pleasant novel, and one that will probably stay on my bookshelf until
I find a young person who will enjoy it even more than I did.
