<i>If Only I Could Tell You</i> is about a festering secret kept for thirty years. That's made clear in the first two chapters. After a few more chapters of reading about arguments, sleepless nights, and endless tension, I was ready to scream, tell me, already!
But Beckerman didn't tell until nearly the end. Instead she threw out red herrings to lead the reader in all the wrong directions. I thought I had it figured out about a third of the way in, but I was wrong. The mysterious secret isn't what kept me reading. It was the women, three different alternating voices, who were so well drawn they pulled me into their world and made me care what happened to each of them.
This isn't a happy book. Beyond the main dark secret, it's full of tragedies great and small, all the scary things that we pray will never happen to us. Other reviewers have listed some of those family tragedies. I won't because they aren't what the story is about.
If I Could Only Tell You is about women. It's about the choices we make and the choices that are made for us. It's about how those choices affect our lives and the lives of children and grandchildren.