A review by lanidon
The Silence in Her Eyes by Armando Lucas Correa

4.0

I had a really hard time rating this because I loved certain elements and hated others. I think the effectiveness of the story hinges on how you feel towards the mc. She's messily unpredictable in a way that kind of makes sense for someone who has been babied her entire life and not allowed to form her own identity. She grasps on to anyone who shows her kindness or interest and becomes far too attached too quickly. She also loses that attachment the second they are out of sight, which gives sections of her story an unfinished quality that is realistic to life but may not feel like a good story

what do you mean she never talks to Alice again? What do you mean she barely grieves her lifelong caretaker? What do you mean she didn't even go to the gallery show about her?

Well, of course she moved on, she was already clinging to someone new. The way she lives her life is a mirror to her condition, lived in frames and blinked away when there's movement. This makes the story interesting, but also makes it messy, choppy, and incomplete

I ended up mostly enjoying it as a character study but not as much for the plot. Especially not the twists....

For those who want to know what happened without finishing it:

Alice, a new neighbor, befriends the mc and primes her that her husband is a dangerous and abusive man. One night, Alice screams out for help and Leah runs in and stabs him. Leah realizes this husband is NOT the man who had been breaking into her apartment and goes on a quest to track that man down. She finally finds him at a moment she is floundering without anyone to cling onto, it's the old employee at the bookstore she'd go to. She convinced herself this is fate and coincidence because she doesn't feel scared of him. She becomes attached to him now, falls in love, and wants to move in together and start a family. One night she follows him and finds him talking to Alice on the subway platform, it turns out they were once in love, he has been breaking in to Leah's, and they manipulated her into killing the husband so they could be together, they broke up and Alice is concerned Leah will find out. The book ends with Leah recounting how she had "helped" multiple people escape their situations by assisting their deaths: her father, an elderly neighbor, her mother, then her caretaker. In that moment, Alice sees Leah on the subway steps, Alice slips backwards into the platform and drags her lover with her. The last sentence implies that Leah is so transfixed by this moment that she's able to see the movement. End of book