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A review by liralen
The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton
3.0
Mm. I guess so. I'm often quite situational about books I read: if I think a book takes place in the wilderness, I'm much more likely to read it. A woman and her daughter trekking through the Alaskan wild? SIGN ME UP.
As it turns out, though, there's a definite 'bathtub story' element to this: Yasmin and Ruby spend much of the book crossing Alaska, yes, but...in a truck. A giant truck. And as it's been a long time since 'be a truck driver' was on my bucket list (it was right before 'learn to drive', and I still haven't managed that, sooooo driving a lorry for a living seems unlikely), that doesn't interest me nearly so much as...wilderness outside the confines of a truck cab.
I know so little about Alaska, and on the one hand it's useful to have another view of what Alaska looks like—there's a certain grimness to the descriptions here, a sense of blank desolation. But on the other hand...
So! All fine and all. Nice to see an environmental element. But not, alas (through no fault of the book's own), the more 'nature-y' book that I would have hoped for.
As it turns out, though, there's a definite 'bathtub story' element to this: Yasmin and Ruby spend much of the book crossing Alaska, yes, but...in a truck. A giant truck. And as it's been a long time since 'be a truck driver' was on my bucket list (it was right before 'learn to drive', and I still haven't managed that, sooooo driving a lorry for a living seems unlikely), that doesn't interest me nearly so much as...wilderness outside the confines of a truck cab.
I know so little about Alaska, and on the one hand it's useful to have another view of what Alaska looks like—there's a certain grimness to the descriptions here, a sense of blank desolation. But on the other hand...
Spoiler
get to the end of the book, and we hear a character describe his time outside in the wilderness, and that's pretty much what I wanted from the rest of the book: I wanted to experience that outside-in-the-wilderness in real time, as Yasmin and Ruby (and, sure, Matt) travel by dogsled and struggle to take care of the dogs and build a snow shelter and...and yes, Yasmin and Ruby still have to work to survive in an Alaskan storm—but from the confines of a truck cab, which feels very, very different.So! All fine and all. Nice to see an environmental element. But not, alas (through no fault of the book's own), the more 'nature-y' book that I would have hoped for.