The Secret Book Society - Madeline Martin - ★★★.½

AUTHOR: Madeline Martin

GENRE: Historical Fiction.

PUBLICATION DATE: August 26, 2025

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A historical fiction that goes much beyond a secret book society. Partly a book about books. Mostly a book about male machoism and female frustration. Interesting female characters, stock male characters. Goes wide rather than deep in themes and topics. The final quarter is quite dark and yet the strongest part of the book. A good novel, as long as you aren’t expecting a light-hearted story about a book club.

Plot Preview:

1895. England. Three women receive an unexpected, strangely-worded invitation for afternoon tea from Lady Duxbury. Each of the women is trapped in their social role in some way or the other. Lady Duxbury intends for them to meet regularly under the façade of a casual get-together, and find what they need, be it friendship, solace, books, or freedom.

Eleanor Clarke, who is of noble birth, is married to an abusive nouveau riche blinded by his new wealth and his desire to climb up the social ladder. Rose Wharton is a rich young American struggling to fit into her new role as an English aristocrat’s wife. Lavinia Cavendish is a nineteen-year-old with a longing to be accepted for what she is. All of them are enamoured by what their new patron, the thrice-widowed Lady Duxbury, proposes: a secret book society. As they begin this journey, they discover more about each other’s lives, not knowing that soon, the strength of their new friendship will be tested.

The story comes to us in the third-person perspectives of Lady Duxbury, Eleanor, Rose, and Lavinia. There is also a first-person story-within-a-story.

Bookish Yays:

📚 The four women characters. The pillars of this book. Each unique and yet strong in various ways. Eleanor was my favourite.

📚 Rose’s experience as the American outsider in the closed ranks of the English upper class. A well-written example of how discrimination existed even among the privileged.

📚 The accurate portrayal of the rigid requirements in the historical English society not just from women but also from titled aristocrats, outsiders, merchant-class men, and elder siblings. The content captures nicely the pulse of the restrictive social mores.

📚 A related yay for highlighting the male privilege, and the bias against wives and daughters, whether it came to inheritance or hobbies or even the clothes worn.

📚 The depiction of the domestic violence – chilling!

📚 Great vocabulary. In today’s overly-processed and digitally-edited writing world, it is always a treat to see apt words being used. Even if these might have been edited through digital aids, the correct contextual usage made it feel natural rather than a shoved-in higher vocab word.

📚 I think my biggest yay from this book has to be the gratitude I felt for being a woman born in the second half of the 20th century.

📚 The author’s note at the end.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

📖 Somehow, Lady Duxbury always sounds much older than she is supposed to be: in her thirties. I don’t know if my mind muddled her with Lady Danbury from the Bridgerton books. The other ladies always sounded their age, whether the teenaged Lavinia or the twenty-something Rose or the thirty-something Eleanor.

📖 Considering that the title highlights a “secret book society”, I expected more bookish discussions. There are references to books and women authors, but a major chunk of the plot is about the characters’ personal travails.

📖 Given that every single female character is in a troublesome domestic situation, the proceedings get a bit too negative. The only positive depiction of marriage comes through Rose’s perspective, but that is also a partially happy situation. I wish there had been a better variety of relationship situations instead of having a variety only in terms of types of female subjugation.

📖 On that note, there are too many examples of how women are maltreated in society. Every theme was important, yes. But not every single trauma faced by women has to be included in a single book!

📖 Pet peeve: I hate it when characters take ages to read a personal journal. In this novel, it was even more odd as the characters blazed through other novels within a week but took more than a few weeks to read the journal. This contained the story-within-a-story I referred to earlier, and it was fairly interesting, even though it also went overboard in terms of feminist themes.

📖 The middle section is the weakest part of the book, going off track into a random trend of the day, which was boring. The final section saves the book to a great extent. At the same time, this section is too dark and disturbing, which wasn’t expected from the title and the initial chapters.

Bookish Nays:

📕 So tiresome and repetitive to see women-oriented plots show most men being monsters. Rose’s husband is the only one with a few good attributes, and another male character is shown as being a feminist in the modern sense of the word. The rest are all narrow-minded caricatures.

📕 Unrealistic to see modern feminist thoughts and anachronous phrases such as “Not all men” pop up in a historical work. The content felt historical in terms of costumes and social behaviour, but the feminism was not of that century, even counting exceptions.

Overall, I expected a more uplifting and soothing read, but this ended up as an infuriating experience for various reasons. It is still a great book (except for that boring tangent in between), as long as you go in prepared for a story about historical discrimination against women than about a secret book club.

Recommended to historical fiction fans. Triggers galore related to women’s mistreatment, matrimony, pregnancy, and motherhood, so ensure that you are in a strong headspace before picking this up.

My thanks to Harlequin Trade Publishing and Hanover Square Press for providing the DRC of “The Secret Book Society” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.