Dirty Little Secrets by C. J. Omololu is a standalone novel. At school, Lucy is a seemingly average girl, however, she hides a huge secret. Her mom is a major hoarder. Stacks of newspaper and clutter line the walls of her home as mold consumes the kitchen and food lies to rot. Lucy does what she can to protect her family’s secret while she counts down the days until she can leave her garbage dump of a house. One morning, she comes home to discover something major happened in her house, something not easy to cover up. Lucy must decide whether or not it is time to reveal her families secret.
Lucy is an annoying protagonist. She lets her need to keep secrets cloud her judgement. She makes many poor choices to deal with her problem. She constantly tries to avoid making friends to keep everyone she is not related to out of her house. When the few friends that she made attempt to help her, she pushes them away. A lot of her issues can be blamed on bad parenting. Her parents are divorced and she is the youngest of three siblings. Sadly, all of her older siblings left her alone with their clutter collecting mom leaving her with to bear the weight of her family’s secret shame.
With a title like Dirty Little Secrets, I wasn’t expecting much from this book. Sadly, it failed to meet even my low standards. The book wasn’t badly written and it was a quick read, but the character is the real problem of the story. She pushed everyone away and didn’t develop at all. Because she pushed everyone away, many characters seem one dimensional and flat. She continually made poor decisions on a problem that should never have been kept secret in the first place. The attempt at romance in this book was rushed and incomplete. If I had not been forced to finish this book, I would have dropped it after the first few pages. This book’s only redeeming quality is that it address the lesser known disorder of hoarding and how it affects children. Sadly, this doesn’t make it a good story. I give this 210 page book 1 star.