The last thing I want to review is thrillers. You tell me to review a satire or a short story or postmodern literature and you'd see the words flying outta my mouth. But when it comes to thrillers, I tend to be a conservative. It's not that it's a difficult thing to do. On the contrary, it's too easy that anything you might say in your review might be a spoiler.
Before I could lay my hands on The Silent Patient, I was totally engrossed reading Rian Hughes's XX, so engrossed that I brought it with me to work and forgot to bring it back home. It was the weekend and didn't want to cheat on XX by starting a new book.
But I did...
And once I'm in, I'm all the way in until the very end.
Michaelides provides the perfect formula for how a thriller should be: easy to read, relatively fast-paced, and interesting enough to be a page-turner. As slow and nitpicky as a reader, I found The Silent Patience a captivating tale about love, betrayal, and trying to break free from the cyclical nature of abuse.
The book is about a woman who kills her husband in cold blood and remains silent for many years after the murder. Due to her mental state, she's admitted to a psych ward. Her new psychotherapist, the narrator, tries to break her vow of silence.
What I like about the story:
a) how short the chapters are,
b) how descriptively limited the diction is, how accessible and relatable it is to the readers. Michaelides doesn't use big, fancy words to exhibit some kind of intellectual superiority. And at the same time, he manages to capture the feeling of the setting and the characters inhabiting it. The prose feels like an impressionistic painting that focuses on the feeling or impression with a couple of brushstrokes on a canvas,
c) the plot that keeps on turning and twisting, catching my attention until the last page.
Overall, reading The Silent Patience was an experience that felt like reading Gone Girl, or watching Shutter Island, but it's unique in its own way. Yes, it borrows from its genre, but it comes out with something original, beautiful, yes, but also disturbing... like really, really disturbing.
