The Tin Box Secret

by Theresa Dodaro

Overview

"It's not the scars on your body that really matter. It's the ones that are left on your soul. They are the ones that don't go away." Teenagers Julie, Heather, and Petra are grappling with the choices they face growing up on Long Island in the late 1960s. Julie and Heather are both trying to navigate relationships with their parents when they meet Petra and Petra's mother, Lydia. Lydia and her family have just returned to their ancestral home after a 25-year absence and Petra soon finds she is not quite welcome because of an unknown past. While reclaiming a tree house that once belonged to Lydia, the girls find a tin box filled with old letters from Petra's great grandmother, Charlotte. Secrets begin to be revealed as the letters detail events from 1912 and a forbidden love affair set against the construction of The Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. The first in a trilogy, The Tin Box Secret is a fascinating look at friendship, family, the challenges we face, and the choices we make to deal with those challenges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517038090
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	10/12/2015
Series:	Tin Box Trilogy , #1
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Writer and mother Theresa Dodaro holds a BA in liberal arts from Stony Brook University, where she studied English, history, and secondary education. She worked in publishing and marketing until she put her career on hold to raise her children.

As her children grew older, she noticed that continued support systems for parents were lacking, and she filled the void by working to create community programs to help educate parents of teens.

Eventually she started a blog called Raising Dramahttp: //www.thetinboxtrilogy.com. Now that her youngest has left for college, she has focused her creative energy on publishing The Tin Box Secret, the first novel in her YA historical fiction trilogy.

Editorial Reviews

2016-01-08
In this coming-of-age novel, three teenage girls in 1960s Long Island get fresh insights into family and other problems when they read a cache of long-hidden letters. Family dinners for Julie Ventura, age 14 in 1968 as the story begins, always include her father's belt strap, laid across his lap as the meal starts in case of misbehavior: "Sometimes he would fold the strap over and hold the ends in each hand and then snap the strap to make a menacing sound of warning." But Julie feels lucky compared with her friend Heather, whose dad abandoned her when she was little, leaving her in her alcoholic mother's care. Their new friend Petra has a different burden: her family just moved back to the spooky old Victorian house where, years ago, Petra's grandmother committed suicide, something the neighborhood still gossips about. As epochal historical events play out—assassinations, the moon landing, Woodstock—Julie navigates the dangerous, sometimes thrilling waters of high school and dating. Meanwhile, the friends discover and read letters from Petra's great-grandmother Charlotte regarding events in 1912. They reveal surprising, tragic family secrets—and form a link to a supernatural connection among the three friends. One strength in Dodaro's debut novel is its unusually thoughtful take on teenage romance: "Sometimes, I wanted him there to be my security blanket," Julie comments. "But I also missed the times when I could just be with my friends without having to worry about what [he] would think or feel about every interaction I had with other people." Dodaro's well-rounded characters avoid clichés; Julie's father, for example, isn't just a brute. But the book crams in too many after-school special-type issues, with improbably wise teenagers delivering weighty lines: "It's not the scars on your body that really matter it's the ones that are left on your soul" or "They weren't perfect, but they were my family. Even if I couldn't change them, I could change me." With the paranormal elements taking things down still another road, the novel feels unfocused. A sensitive look at growing up in the Sixties, though heavy on the earnest messages.

Kirkus Reviews