Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by crazygoangirl
The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Loveable characters? No
2.5
I bought this book (thankfully - used!), because of its promising premise - a young deaf girl and her mother brave the barren land of North Alaska in the winter to look for her missing father, a wildlife photographer.
The book starts off well, and there’s a credible build up of suspense in true thriller fashion. I was engaged and wanted to know what happened next. Unfortunately, after a promising start, Lupton got bogged down in repetitive descriptions of the Alaskan landscape and the internal dialogue of Yasmin, the mother of Ruby, the deaf 10-yr-old. Ruby was the only character that I felt a connect to. She was charming, smart, funny and incredibly brave in the face of gigantic odds. I loved her tweets and how she describes what words feel and taste like to her! I wanted more!
Yasmin, I disliked intensely. As a mother myself, I have no tolerance for mothers (even in fiction), who act worse than juveniles because they cannot get over their childhood issues. Yasmin angered me with her absolute disregard for Ruby’s safety while purporting to care and love her daughter more than anything else. She was a liar and a coward and although she figured out her own idiocy toward the end, it was too little too late for me.
I loved the easy, close father-daughter relationship that Matt and Ruby shared. I understand that having lost her mother as a young child herself, Yasmin didn’t have a strong parenting role model, but after an entire lifetime, she should have learnt! Matt was an excellent role model and they’d been married a dozen years! I just couldn’t get past her bad decision making! Strangely, or perhaps because of my dislike of Yasmin, I couldn’t get caught up in the atmosphere, although Lupton does a good job with her descriptions of the raging snowstorms in the Tundra.
In the end, the entire journey felt unbelievable to me! How a woman who has no experience of the climate or of driving an 18-wheeler on normal roads, suddenly gad the skill set to do so in an Arctic snowstorm, I have no clue. The climax was also far-fetched I thought and although there was an interesting twist, once again, I didn’t really care. It was intriguing to read about ‘fracking’ though and the glimpses of Inuit life were engaging and I would have loved to read more details.
In the end, this was disappointing in terms of pacing and characters. The atmosphere should have worked throughout but did so most effectively only during the snowstorm portions for me, when I felt the menace and fear that Lupton infused into her narrative. For the most part however, it felt forced and repetitive, not sinister and malevolent as it should have. Perhaps if I’d liked Yasmin more I would have disliked the book less? 🤷🏼♀️ Also, I thought it was too long and could have been edited to make it more taut and tense. I felt like Lupton tried to include too many themes into the story and it jarred. Deafness, comin-of-age, marital issues (more imagined than anything else 🙄), environmental issues, each complicated and touched on superficially, except for the deafness and fracking, in my opinion. It took me a while to get used to her writing as well, which was choppy at first but became descriptive and easy as I read on.
Ruby will stay with me and I thought her coming-of-age story and her attitude toward her disability very well done, but I’ve read far better thrillers!
The book starts off well, and there’s a credible build up of suspense in true thriller fashion. I was engaged and wanted to know what happened next. Unfortunately, after a promising start, Lupton got bogged down in repetitive descriptions of the Alaskan landscape and the internal dialogue of Yasmin, the mother of Ruby, the deaf 10-yr-old. Ruby was the only character that I felt a connect to. She was charming, smart, funny and incredibly brave in the face of gigantic odds. I loved her tweets and how she describes what words feel and taste like to her! I wanted more!
Yasmin, I disliked intensely. As a mother myself, I have no tolerance for mothers (even in fiction), who act worse than juveniles because they cannot get over their childhood issues. Yasmin angered me with her absolute disregard for Ruby’s safety while purporting to care and love her daughter more than anything else. She was a liar and a coward and although she figured out her own idiocy toward the end, it was too little too late for me.
I loved the easy, close father-daughter relationship that Matt and Ruby shared. I understand that having lost her mother as a young child herself, Yasmin didn’t have a strong parenting role model, but after an entire lifetime, she should have learnt! Matt was an excellent role model and they’d been married a dozen years! I just couldn’t get past her bad decision making! Strangely, or perhaps because of my dislike of Yasmin, I couldn’t get caught up in the atmosphere, although Lupton does a good job with her descriptions of the raging snowstorms in the Tundra.
In the end, the entire journey felt unbelievable to me! How a woman who has no experience of the climate or of driving an 18-wheeler on normal roads, suddenly gad the skill set to do so in an Arctic snowstorm, I have no clue. The climax was also far-fetched I thought and although there was an interesting twist, once again, I didn’t really care. It was intriguing to read about ‘fracking’ though and the glimpses of Inuit life were engaging and I would have loved to read more details.
In the end, this was disappointing in terms of pacing and characters. The atmosphere should have worked throughout but did so most effectively only during the snowstorm portions for me, when I felt the menace and fear that Lupton infused into her narrative. For the most part however, it felt forced and repetitive, not sinister and malevolent as it should have. Perhaps if I’d liked Yasmin more I would have disliked the book less? 🤷🏼♀️ Also, I thought it was too long and could have been edited to make it more taut and tense. I felt like Lupton tried to include too many themes into the story and it jarred. Deafness, comin-of-age, marital issues (more imagined than anything else 🙄), environmental issues, each complicated and touched on superficially, except for the deafness and fracking, in my opinion. It took me a while to get used to her writing as well, which was choppy at first but became descriptive and easy as I read on.
Ruby will stay with me and I thought her coming-of-age story and her attitude toward her disability very well done, but I’ve read far better thrillers!