Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.98 AVERAGE
3.98 AVERAGE
Spännande att följa en terapi och sen utvecklar det sig till något mer oförutsägbart intressant
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A must read.
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
medium-paced
“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
You guys, THIS BOOK
You guys, THIS BOOK
An artist, after killing her husband, clams up, refusing to divulge any information about the incident, either to her innocence or her guilt, until a psychotherapist--which is not the same as psychiatrist, mind you--takes up her therapy.
This book is not for me. The prose was too choppy and repetitive, the twist too generic, and the characters too unexplored. This would've made an awesome one-time-watch movie, but as a novel, it leaves the reader desiring.
Before I begin to expound on my issues with The Silent Patient, let me say that it is the first novel published by the author, so it is understandable that the book had marks of being authored by an inexperienced writer, and probably someone with more experience about screenplays than about novels. His choppy, repetitive prose of providing action descriptions make sense if you know that the author got his MA in screenwriting.
My biggest issue with the novel was the choice of the POV. The Silent Patient is written in a first person POV, which is more frequent in YA genre where the sentimentality of the young characters brimming with emotion is more important than the choices they make and the actions they take. In adult novels, though, if you get a first person narrative, you can almost always be certain that the narrator will turn out to be an unreliable narrator. If you know this device, the twist the book pulls off at the end will be apparent to you from the middle of the book. And, for a novel whose biggest draw is the plot-twist, it does not bode well if the reader can see it coming from miles off.
The other issue I had are the characters in the novel. They are used just as red-herrings, to divert the reader on the wrong track, like in movies such as Scream. Paper-thin characters, existing only to serve the plot and the twist.
Lastly, I was annoyed out of my mind by the stupendous amount of em-dashes used in the book. I will attribute this weird use of punctuation in unjustified places with the history of the author as a screenwriter. If you read screenplays for movies or TV, you'd know that they use a lot of em-dashes to mark transitions in dialogue and action descriptions. In narrative prose, though, em-dashes are sparsely used, only when it is necessary, i.e. to mark breaks in thoughts.
This book is not for me. The prose was too choppy and repetitive, the twist too generic, and the characters too unexplored. This would've made an awesome one-time-watch movie, but as a novel, it leaves the reader desiring.
Before I begin to expound on my issues with The Silent Patient, let me say that it is the first novel published by the author, so it is understandable that the book had marks of being authored by an inexperienced writer, and probably someone with more experience about screenplays than about novels. His choppy, repetitive prose of providing action descriptions make sense if you know that the author got his MA in screenwriting.
My biggest issue with the novel was the choice of the POV. The Silent Patient is written in a first person POV, which is more frequent in YA genre where the sentimentality of the young characters brimming with emotion is more important than the choices they make and the actions they take. In adult novels, though, if you get a first person narrative, you can almost always be certain that the narrator will turn out to be an unreliable narrator. If you know this device, the twist the book pulls off at the end will be apparent to you from the middle of the book. And, for a novel whose biggest draw is the plot-twist, it does not bode well if the reader can see it coming from miles off.
The other issue I had are the characters in the novel. They are used just as red-herrings, to divert the reader on the wrong track, like in movies such as Scream. Paper-thin characters, existing only to serve the plot and the twist.
Lastly, I was annoyed out of my mind by the stupendous amount of em-dashes used in the book. I will attribute this weird use of punctuation in unjustified places with the history of the author as a screenwriter. If you read screenplays for movies or TV, you'd know that they use a lot of em-dashes to mark transitions in dialogue and action descriptions. In narrative prose, though, em-dashes are sparsely used, only when it is necessary, i.e. to mark breaks in thoughts.
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes