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A review by carinascatsandchapters
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
3.0
*spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the book don’t read this*
HOLY. HELL.
At first I was skeptical about this book. It took me a minute to get into it, I felt like there was a lot of establishment. Which now makes absolute perfect sense.
By having Theo as the narrator, wanting to help Alicia, you want to trust him. He makes HER seem like the one with the unreliable story.
But instead, we have a classic unreliable narrator. Just simply set up in a brilliant way. I truly thought we were operating in a single timeline all the way until the reveal… until that final scene felt all but too familiar and I realized what had been happening all along. Kathy was cheating with Gabriel.
Throughout the whole book I thought Alicia was innocent. There were far too many suspects, too many people with motive to kill Gabriel and frame Alicia. But this twist surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it to be the one other character in the book that as a reader I thought I knew so well.
I LOVE the fact that Alicia ended up being reliable. That her diary entries were in fact accurate. My friend and I had talked lightly about this being similar to Verity (which I enjoyed but not as much as this one) and yes, both have that unreliable narrator. However there was something so much more twisted here. The element of surprise was so much stronger where as in Verity I knew the ending twist almost the whole time.
I FLEW through the second half of this book, but I especially love the set up and would love to see this in a movie form too. Is that a thing? Has someone done that? It gives me One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest vibes….could be incredible.
HOLY. HELL.
At first I was skeptical about this book. It took me a minute to get into it, I felt like there was a lot of establishment. Which now makes absolute perfect sense.
By having Theo as the narrator, wanting to help Alicia, you want to trust him. He makes HER seem like the one with the unreliable story.
But instead, we have a classic unreliable narrator. Just simply set up in a brilliant way. I truly thought we were operating in a single timeline all the way until the reveal… until that final scene felt all but too familiar and I realized what had been happening all along. Kathy was cheating with Gabriel.
Throughout the whole book I thought Alicia was innocent. There were far too many suspects, too many people with motive to kill Gabriel and frame Alicia. But this twist surprised me. I wasn’t expecting it to be the one other character in the book that as a reader I thought I knew so well.
I LOVE the fact that Alicia ended up being reliable. That her diary entries were in fact accurate. My friend and I had talked lightly about this being similar to Verity (which I enjoyed but not as much as this one) and yes, both have that unreliable narrator. However there was something so much more twisted here. The element of surprise was so much stronger where as in Verity I knew the ending twist almost the whole time.
I FLEW through the second half of this book, but I especially love the set up and would love to see this in a movie form too. Is that a thing? Has someone done that? It gives me One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest vibes….could be incredible.