![]() *MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD* Any book that receives a massive amount of hype threatens to let readers down when the climax or twist ending doesn't deliver quite the way it's expected to. That's what happened here for me, but on a degree that didn't make my overall reading experience a flop. I have some gripes about how the female characters are portrayed in general that also contribute to some of my more negative comments about this book, but there are plenty of good things to talk about first! The integration of Alicia's journal entries, for example -- chef's kiss and one of my favorite parts of the entire story as well as the novel's form. Beginning with her voice juxtaposes so well the irony that she remains silent for nearly the entire book. It's just so good. And each part beginning with her expanding on this story that she's being watched and no one's listening to her works to make the reader wonder if they can trust Alicia or not. She is, after all, in a psych ward for killing her husband. Getting the main narrator, Theo's, perspective for the majority of the book serves the twist ending I think the author's able to pull off well. A combination of maintaining the illusion that Theo cares about Alicia for pure reasons (related to his humanity and devotion to his career of psychotherapy) and seeing Alicia act out in occasionally violent fits sustains the notion that Alicia is not mentally well and needs the interference of someone who thinks they can help in her journey of healing and eventual return to speaking. While it becomes clear this isn't entirely the case, I was still entertained long enough to get to the first false victory: Theo getting Alicia to speak. Precisely because we see Theo dealing with the realization his wife is cheating on him with some unknown man, the possibility he's mentally unstable is believable later and, more than anything, satisfying. When he starts to unravel and fantasize about what he'll do when he gets his hands on his wife's lover, he's already showing signs that he's capable of the violence and crazy he displays with Alicia -- it's just not until the end that we realize how unreliable of a narrator Theo is, that he's been telling us a story that operates on two separate timelines for the sake of revealing all the stuff he did to Alicia after the fact that she killed her husband -- something he didn't think she'd actually go through with doing. Now, I was really worried that Theo was going to get away with all of it, that the way he'd been viewing and talking about and treating the female characters in this book the whole time was going to go unaccounted for. But Alicia being sneaky with the placement of her journal to end up getting Theo incriminated was even more satisfying a twist for me then realizing Theo had been Alicia's stalker all along. Even with the obvious attraction he was feeling toward Alicia in their sessions, I was still shocked enough to gasp out loud and start piecing together all the parts of the narrative's puzzle in my head with delight. There's a lot more I could talk about regarding the side characters, but I'll mainly just comment that I think they're really well written to serve smaller order purposes in the narrative. Like Christian being a perfect suspicious therapist with motives regarding Alicia that can't be anything but good. And the head of a psych ward having extensive knowledge on a Greek myth directly tied to Alicia's circumstances and personal affiliations (later revealed in her journal). This mythological tie in was one of my favorite parts. But are we surprised? I get the sense the male author of this book wanted the clearly unreliable, egotistical narrator of his book to not treat or view women in the healthiest of manners, but at times I had to remind myself that just because the novel was written by a man doesn't mean he was ignorant to the portrayal of his female characters throughout. Whether or not this was the best execution of a purposefully problematic character, I'm a sucker for a solid unreliable narrator to analyze and maybe even despise, so I was on board with Theo, at least from an analytical perspective, from the start. The character I was the most intrigued by from start to finish was Alicia, though. Star of the show for real. Was I entirely convinced by all the stuff about how it was actually Gabriel who killed Alicia and not she who killed Gabriel? No, but I still appreciated the drama of the big moment and how it connected to other psychology tidbits sprinkled throughout. I wished I could've been able to see depictions of her art that are described so beautifully throughout. I also had fun listening to the audiobook version of this novel. The voice actors were very talented, and it felt like the kind of thriller made to fit the theatrical elements of an audiobook. I give it a solid four and a half stars. Some of my favorite quotes from The Silent Patient: "...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant." "We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged - we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.” (can you say 'foreshadowing'?) "Trust, once lost, is hard to recover." "Well, I’d rather be lonely than be with the wrong person." (BARS) "Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way."
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AuthorHey, everyone! I'm a writing and literature student at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. When I'm not reading or writing, I'm probably watching movies, surfing, singing, or listening to Tchaikovsky and Laufey. Archives
February 2025
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