Review: The Secret of Ella and Micha (The Secret, #1)

Author: Jessica Sorensen
Series: The Secret, #1
Release date: April 11th 2013
Publisher: Sphere
Paperback, 320 pages
Source: Publisher for review
Buy: The Book Depository

The girl he thinks he loves needs to disappear. I don't want tonight to be irreversible, so I pull away, breathing him in one last time.

Ella and Micha have been best friends since childhood, until one tragic night shatters their relationship and Ella decides to leave everything behind to start a new life at college, including Micha.

But now it's summer break and she has nowhere else to go but home. Ella fears everything she worked so hard to bury might resurface, especially with Micha living right next door. Micha is sexy, smart, confident, and can get under Ella's skin like no one else can. He knows everything about her, including her darkest secrets. And he's determined to win back the girl he lost, no matter what it takes.

To repeat what I tweeted while I was halfway through this book – All this angst and not a single blueberry muffin in sight! Life can be so unfair sometimes.

Honestly, this book oozes angst, and while I know there are many readers who enjoy just that (proven by the very fact that this book is a New York Times bestseller), I’m not a fan myself. However, that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy this book – I did. I just thought it was pushed a bit too far at times.

Ella and Micha have been best friends since childhood, but they were always either too afraid to take their friendship further, or there was something standing in their way. Neither of them comes from a happy home. Ella’s mother is dead and her father is an alcoholic, and Micha’s father walked out ages ago, never to be heard from again. Through it all, they always had each other, until one day, Ella just packed up and disappeared - no note, no goodbye.

Micha spent the next eight months obsessively searching for Ella. He always knew he loved her, but he waited for her to come to him, and when she left, he realized it might be too late. He put his life on hold and moved heaven and earth to find her, but Ella was nowhere to be found. When she suddenly reappeared, Micha decided he’d waited long enough. It was clear to him that he and Ella were made for each other, so all he had to do was convince her of that fact.

In a way, I’m glad neither Ella nor Micha resolved their family situations in the end. That would have turned this book into a fairy tale, and I dislike fairy tales on principle. It was never about making their lives perfect, it was about facing everything that comes at them together. Things as big as alcoholism or estrangement can’t be resolved overnight, but I loved seeing them make their peace with their respective situations.

Although I’m not in the habit of punishing books (or authors) for things that are entirely the publisher’s fault, I feel I have to point out that The Secret of Ella and Micha is chock full of editing issues. There are spelling errors, grammar errors and formatting errors on almost every page. I realize it was self-published first, but I thought the whole purpose of traditional publishing was to avoid this kind of thing. A half-decent copy editor could have fixed this in no more than a few days.

Clearly every successful book gives birth to a trilogy these days, and that is the case with The Secrets of Ella and Micha. They will be getting a sequel soon that will apparently focus on their family situations and issues with long distance relationship. After that, Lila and Ethan will be getting their own book as well.