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A review by pawact
The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton
2.0
Talented novelist takes a bit of a big swing here and whiffs. The idea is pretty good. Astrophysicist Yasmin drags her ten year old daughter Ruby, who is deaf, to Alaska after hearing her husband and Ruby's father Chris, a wildlife photographer, was killed in a fire that took out a small Inupiaq town way the hell up north. Their marriage was on shaky ground under suspicion that Chris fell for an Inupiaq woman. Some instinct tells her that her husband is still alive, so she finagles a ride on a truck to get to this village just as a major storm is blowing in. Circumstances I will not completely reveal leave Yasmin driving the truck herself while being tailed by another rig as she desperately tries to reach her husband who, again, everyone presumes is dead.
This is a tough plot because three quarters of the book is Yasmin and Ruby in a cab of a truck. Lupton tries to break it up by flashing back to Chris and Yasmin's courtship but it is pretty claustrophobic. Not many people can really build tension on this premise, except for maybe Stephen King and possibly Emma Donoghue (who wrote a positive blurb for this book). It's a heavy lift and Lupton doesn't succeed.
The other issue is Ruby's voice. Lupton is trying to get into the mind and mimic the language of a ten year old girl and doesn't quite get there. For example, she overuses slang like Supercoolio
She is on surer ground with the adults. Yasmin feels realer. And she does manage to beautifully describe the Alaskan landscape.
Lupton is a good novelist and you can feel that throughout. She manages to create a solid relationship between Yasmin and Ruby, the main conflict being Yasmin trying to get Ruby to talk and not use a device that she can type her words into and absolutely not use a laptop, which she fears distorts the real world situations that Ruby will find herself in as an adult.
The mystery itself (how did the town get torched and who is trying to stop them from getting there) is fairly predictable to figure out. It is more a framework to hang the characters conflicts and development on.
It is not a bad novel at all. It just feels like a talented writer spinning her wheels.
This is a tough plot because three quarters of the book is Yasmin and Ruby in a cab of a truck. Lupton tries to break it up by flashing back to Chris and Yasmin's courtship but it is pretty claustrophobic. Not many people can really build tension on this premise, except for maybe Stephen King and possibly Emma Donoghue (who wrote a positive blurb for this book). It's a heavy lift and Lupton doesn't succeed.
The other issue is Ruby's voice. Lupton is trying to get into the mind and mimic the language of a ten year old girl and doesn't quite get there. For example, she overuses slang like Supercoolio
She is on surer ground with the adults. Yasmin feels realer. And she does manage to beautifully describe the Alaskan landscape.
Lupton is a good novelist and you can feel that throughout. She manages to create a solid relationship between Yasmin and Ruby, the main conflict being Yasmin trying to get Ruby to talk and not use a device that she can type her words into and absolutely not use a laptop, which she fears distorts the real world situations that Ruby will find herself in as an adult.
The mystery itself (how did the town get torched and who is trying to stop them from getting there) is fairly predictable to figure out. It is more a framework to hang the characters conflicts and development on.
It is not a bad novel at all. It just feels like a talented writer spinning her wheels.