Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Bookoutre, and Kate Hewitt for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

This is the second book in Kate Hewitt’s Emerald Sisters series about four girls who meet on the SS St. Louis, trying to escape the Nazis in Germany. The ship was well-known for the fact that it was turned away from so many places with a complement of passengers who were Jews trying to escape the Holocaust. In the first book, The Girl on the Boat, we met all four girls but only followed the story of Sophie as she was able to disembark before the ship headed back to Europe and carve out a life for herself in the United States.

This second book follows Rosa. She was leaving Germany with her parents. Her father was a wealthy doctor in Germany and used to being the center of attention. Still, when the Nazis took over their home, even he was forced to leave the country. When the SS St. Louis is turned away from Cuba, Rosa and her parents don’t know where they will end up. Eventually they are allowed to enter England.

Arriving in London, they are given an apartment in a Jewish neighborhood, that is a big step down from what they are used to. The Jewish refugee agency that found the place for them will only pay the first month’s rent, and there will be another family residing with them eventually. Her father goes to try to see what became of the money he was allowed to send out of the country, and finds out it has disappeared.

Rosa seems to be the only one in her family with a grip on reality as she finds work in a coffee shop washing dishes. Her mother sits in a chair by the window, while her father pontifcates to other refugees and considers learning English and sitting again for medical exams beneath him. Rosa also begins attending English classes, and that is where she meets Peter, a fellow refugee who was maimed by the Nazis at one of the camps.

However, Rosa is carrying a guilty secret. That secret could threaten everything of the life she has in London. Rosa wonders if she confessed the secret to her friends from the ship if they would even like her anymore. She is afraid to admit the truth to Peter or anyone. Yet, secrets from the past have a way of coming back to haunt people.

I liked The Girl With a Secret as much as I liked the first book. I was guessing what her secret was, and I actually thought it was much worse than it turned out to be. Still, it had an impact on the family as a whole. However, once it was out in the open and they could talk about it, things got better for all of them.

Rosa didn’t have a great relationship with her parents. That was clear in the first book. Here, it’s the same for a while. Rosa sees her parents as selfish, preening prima donnas. They think living as they do in London is somehow beneath them, while Rosa will do what needs to be done to survive. Her mother breaks her heart with her selfishness, but her father comes to her rescue. At the same time, she knows her father’s faults and doesn’t like them either. She is caught between them, not really liking either of them, yet somehow feeling responsible for them.

The story moved along quite well and I enjoyed it. I did have some difficulty following the time changes. At the beginning of a chapter there would be a date, but during the chapters time would jump a bit and I’d forget what year we were in as I waited for certain events I knew from history to take place. That was the only difficulty I had with the book. Otherwise, I thought it flowed nicely and created multi-dimensional people who did have the capacity to learn from their mistakes.

If you like historical fiction, particularly the World War II era, this is a good book in a good series so far. The characters are well fleshed-out and fun to follow. They grow with the circumstances, and change in a way you might not expect.

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