Eva Rice is the daughter of the lyricist Tim Rice, who named her after Evita. He has collaborated over the years with Andrew Lloyd Webber in many of his musicals, including Evita. He also was an admirer of the late king of rock 'in' roll Elvis Presley. So it is no surprise that her first novel is grounded in pop music and that the author has a fine ear for dialogue. She is well-known for a number of novels for young adults and teenagers. Her published works include Standing Room Only (2001), Who's Who In Enid Blyton (2003) and The Dragon Fly Summer (2009).  In The Lost Art Of Keeping Secrets Eva Rice takes us to post-war London in the 1950s. Penelope Wallace, just 18 years old, lives with her mother and brother in a huge house called "Milton Magna" that there father bought before he died in battle. We are immediately captivated by Penelope's chance encounter with Charlotte and from there on you feel delightfully propelled into a new circle of friends. It includes Charlotte's Aunt Clare and her cousin Harry, Penelope's brother Inigo, and not least of all, their mother Talitha Orr. The mother is still mourning the loss of her husband and has an aversion to the changes beginning to sweep over England and her daughter.  We soon become aware that there is a mysterious connection between the mother and the Aunt Clare, but they never meet until the end of the novel. She knows about the slow demise of the great old house, Milton Magna Hall, built in 1462.  Her Aunt Clare says, "To watch a great house dying is a terrible tragedy ... one of the great tragedies known to man. Goodness knows, I've known enough of the ones who have gone. We'll look back on this time in horror, you know, girls. In fifty years no one will believe that so many great houses were forced to fall" (page 19).

It is Charlotte who shines throughout the story as a highly resourceful and energetic character, bringing life into the huge run-down mansion, making Penelope's studies fade into the background while the two girls plot meetings and listen with passion to Johnny Ray records, an American singer for whom Penelope harbours an obsession.  Enter a middle-aged American, Rocky, a movie producer who gives them a wonderful sense of feeling mature and important, as he has qualities of warmth and helps them in tense moments. He also seems to fill the old house with his presence, not felt since the father died. For Inigo, the younger brother and a singer, he brings the totally new style of Elvis Presley.

Talitha has an aversion to Americans at first, but of course eventually, subtly, she is brought around to achieve a new attitude.

There are parties and the girls are obsessed with clothes, but they also study Tennyson and watch Harry's magic tricks, take walks and have picnics and smoke cigarettes with drinks...it's all light stuff but somehow never boring.

Penelope is a writer who is trying to absorb her father's death and keep her mother from worrying about how to preserve the old house and survive financially, as well as keep her from thinking about their father too much. One of the threads concerns an American prima donna, Marina Hamilton, who has captivated Harry, but is newly engaged to an older man, George. Harry persuades Penelope to be with him at a party to make Marina jealous.

Thus he spends a great deal of time with Penelope and he actually succeeds in getting Marina back, which leads to a very funny scene in Milton Magna Hall where she comes to bemoan losing Harry and flounce around majestically.  They tolerate her, which seems very generous of the English, but Rocky finally takes her away. He has intuited that Harry actually is falling in love with Penelope. All of this manoeuvring somehow comes off very comically and one cannot help but flip the pages and laugh at society, enjoying the changes wrought in people as they discover the value of true companionship and kindness.  An example of the author's tone is found when Inigo is falling in love with Elvis Presley's music: "Inigo came home from school the next day and ripped open the brown parcel that contained his yearned-for photographs. There were five pictures in all and in four of them Elvis was smiling - standing next to Uncle Luke and his friend Sam Phillips, even holding up a bottle of beer with Loretta. He had the most amazing hair, pale brown and shiny like a shampoo advertisement and the most beautiful eyes that seemed to laugh into the camera, full of light and life. But the fifth image was different. He was onstage, and a sneer was on his lips, and just looking at the picture made me uncomfortable. There was something unsettling but thrilling about the fire in his eyes that made me feel as if he were staring right at me and might at any moment climb right out of the photograph and into the room to kiss me. Inigo put on the new record that Uncle Luke had sent him, and we plowed our way through a bag of apples and studied Elvis as he sang. "I want to look like him," announced Inigo as the record came to an end. "I could look like him if I tried" (page 190). Inigo tries impersonating Elvis. Penelope says to him, "You look like you're in pain".  "Inigo ignored me and struck a few chords of the song that Uncle Luke had first played us, Blue Moon of Kentucky and I was forced to stop laughing, for he had the art of imitation perfected. At the end of the first verse he swung around the room, jiving away as if possessed by the spirit of Sam Phillips' recording studio, and I beat my hands on the surface of the dining room table in time to his playing and stamped my feet and the sharp heel of my shoes made a terrific sound on the wooden floor. It took me all my life up to that moment to realize that without noise, Magna may as well have crumbled and fallen to dust.

Without youth the house was just a shell, a shadow. We may not have had the money to keep the house how it deserved to be kept, but we had the energy to fight its demise for all we were worth" (page 191).  The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets was a runner-up in the "Best Read of the Year" in the British Book Awards. I recommend the book as a terrific light read when you simply cannot read any more profound books. It's awfully smartly done, if a bit too unlikely at the end, but all the dialogue is so much fun and the characters are totally real.
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