Customer Reviews

Secret Love

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It's about time somebody wrote this book that takes a look at San Francisco during the era that the civil rights movement gets off the ground. A widowered Jewish civil rights lawyer falls in love with a young woman who is half black, half white, during a time when that meant a lot of exclusion for her. These characters are very skillfully done, and that whole era is conjured up in authentic ways. The book is sort of a valentine to the real ethnic mix that is San Francisco, not the touristy image it acquired. I read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down. Blue Bossa was a good novel, but this one is even better.

I picked up this book because the jacket description sounded interesting: in 1960s San Francisco, Jake, a widowed attorney and civil rights activist, falls for Nisa, a beautiful, much younger black woman. At the same time, Nisa's gay actor friend, Peter, falls for a handsome younger black male, Simon. Despite this intriguing premise, I found it very difficult to become absorbed in this novel at first. In particular, I never got a good feel for the characters; they didn't seem very well-defined to me, and so I never understood the rationale for their behaviors.

The first part of the novel centers mainly around Jake and Nisa, with the second half devoting more equal time to Peter and Simon. One of these romances ends in tragedy, and the other just ends--ultimately, I wasn't sure exactly what the book was trying to say. However, the descriptions of San Francisco plus the civil rights zeitgeist added interesting elements to the story; there was enough here that I *wanted* to find out how it ended even though I was a bit disappointed once I did.

I admit-I don't read fiction because I'm a slow reader and I think there's too much information that I'm missing if I get involved in fiction. Having said that I loved Secret Love and am tempted to buy his previous book.

I was very fortunate in that I lived in San Francisco in the years after the setting of this novel ['62-'63] and I highlited every city reference that Schneider mentions-streets, businesses, streetcars, sporting references-everything and the entire novel was one wonderful lookback for me. I cannot judge Secret Love by the standards of literary analysis but I can say that he presented an extremely compelling plot-certainly, in my opinion, far removed from anything that would fall under the rubric of "boring".

Schneider's San Francisco falls into that exclusive period between the end of the "Beat" era and the onset of the more
popularly known "Hippie" era with one of the main players actually getting a job behind the counter at that city icon of City Lights bookstore. A fitting dessert for a sumptious meal.