Joe's Reviews > All Her Little Secrets

My introduction to the fiction of Wanda M. Morris is All Her Little Secrets. Published in 2021, this debut novel is set in a legal department of an Atlanta transportation company being picketed by Black and Hispanic activists for its discriminatory hiring practices. Ellice Littlejohn is the only Black attorney at the company and reports to work early at the urging of her white boss and lover, who she discovers dead at his desk from a gunshot wound to the head.

I abandoned this on page 71/371. At 20%, the story didn't grab me, the writing is cursory and character motivation implausible. The author moves back in time to the protagonist's childhood in Chillicothe, Georgia when she wins admittance to a school for the gifted that will get her out of town and away from her alcoholic mother. Morris sets the stage for dark secrets or past crimes coming back to haunt her protagonist. This distracts from the mystery developing in the present day.

I struggled to empathize with the protagonist, not because she was helping commit adultery, but because she made the stupid decision to sleep with her boss. Rookie corporate mistake there and if there's one thing I dislike in a novel, it's people who are lousy at their jobs. If Ellice was introduced at being really good, maybe even the best at something, I would've followed her anywhere. An inept protagonist? Mildly annoying.

The writing leans toward the superficial, but the larger issue I had is that Morris employs what Roger Ebert coined the Idiot Plot, which dictates that the story would be over in 5 minutes if the protagonist didn't behave like an idiot. Fleeing a crime scene seems like a big risk for a corporate lawyer. I don't think they teach that in Junior Law. So we begin with a protagonist who's following an ill-advised romantic choice with a potentially disastrous legal choice, because, reasons.

Morris has since published two more novels, but since this was her debut, no rating from me.