I’ve never read Doctor Zhivago. I’ve never felt the need, the ending was spoiled for me before it would have been an age appropriate read. If I had read it perhaps I would have been expecting The Secrets We Kept to turn out the way it did, and I wouldn’t have been so disappointed.

It isn’ the writing that’s an issue. Lara Prescott is a talented writer, she delivers cadence, and description.

What she doesn’t deliver is a spy novel. The Secrets We Kept promises the tale of two female spies from the typing pool at the CIA smuggling the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago from behind the iron curtain – that never happens. Nothing even remotely close to that happens.

What we get is three separate narratives: the typing pool; a fictionalized history of Pasternak and Ivanskya (an author in her own right and his mistress – inspiration for Zhivago’s Lara) (neither of these people are remotely sympathetic); and then the narratives of Sally Forester and Irina (the ladies we thought were recruited from the typing pool to be spies), there is an attempt to tie these narratives together in the last chapter but it’s contrived, and sophomoric.

Really most of this novel feels contrived, soulless, pretentious. The novel as a whole is pretentious. Again, I’ve never read Doctor Zhivago, but it’s pretty clear that Ms. Prescott meant her characters to be an omage, but half way through decided that her Lara and Zhivago weren’t star crossed or titilating enough for the modern era and suddenly without any development or characterization she springs a lesbian love affair, which creates a love triangle, and I hate love triangles.

Don’t get me wrong, lesbian spies, taking on the old boys club of the CIA in its infancy, that’s a story I would read, and probably read again.

The problem is that it makes no sense. There’s no emotion, no struggle, foreshadowing, nothing. One minute Irina was straight, in a relationship with a man (Teddy) and by her own words he is the only person she felt she could be entirely herself around then the next its Sally. Suddenly all the months Teddy spent training her to be a spy are erased and its Sally who in a few weeks taught her what she really needed to now. As if we wouldn’t notice that the author changed her mind mid-story and didn’t bother to do a rewrite. Even if those plot issues had been dealt with there isn’t a lot of love in the love triangle. Teddy has a genuine love for Irina that’s backed up by his behavior, but Sally and Irina just say they are in love.

Again maybe if I’ld read Doctor Zhivago I’ld have had all the foreshadowing I needed. I kept expecting to get to the actual spy story in the next chapter, I was listening to the audio book an a long work trip, I had nothing else to keep me occupied on the drive so I slugged my way through.

What made me feel like the novel had passed the pale of pretentiousness was the final chapter. The three narratives, with tenuous connections need to be tied together, resolution brought to the minuscule conflict, so we get an epilogue of sorts. The nameless typing pool narrator makes the point of stating: that while the CIA viewed Doctor Zhivago as a a tool in the Cold War, and the Soviet Union viewed it as anti-government propaganda it was really just a love story. That felt a little like a slap. As though the author was smirking at me. “You thought this was a spy novel, but really it’s a love story. Just like Doctor Zhivago.” It feel superior and oh so pretentious. It wasn’t even a good love story.

Would you finish a book that had a blatantly misleading description?