** - The Quiet

THE QUIET

BARNABY MARTIN

**

A mother's love can be deafening . . .

Isaac is Hannah’s entire world. She knows that her son is gifted, and that those gifts make him vulnerable. To keep him safe, she spends every waking moment by his side. If she lets her guard down, lets him out of her sight, lets him show what he’s capable of, he will be taken from her.

When the Soundfield arrived twenty years ago, the world changed with it. Now, people are forced to live at night due to the deadly heat of the day, food and water are scarce, and everyday life is punctuated by the constant and disconcerting hum from the Field. A brilliant scientist, Hannah spent her early career working on the enigma of the Soundfield, looking for answers; now, resigned, she has focussed all her energies on keeping Isaac living, not just alive.

To do so, she will have to lie to the people she knows and hope she can trust the ones she doesn't. Because the only thing more dangerous than her lies, is the truth of what she has done.

MY REVIEW

**

I love dystopian thrillers and after reading the blurb for The Quiet, I was excited to request and read it.

When the Soundfield mysteriously arrived, the peace of the world went with it. The sun now burns during the day, the UV rays strong enough to kill and the field hums morning and night with its own song. Hannah and 6 years old Isaac hold a secret, and one they must do anything to protect.

I think some of my lack of engagement with this book has to do with the disconnect between the blurb and what I was reading, particularly in the initial half of the book. The tagline on Goodreads mentioned a silenced world, which isn’t true as the world is more or less the same, in fact with more noise due to the hum of the sound-field. The other thing which confused me was the part about having to keep her child safe - I was expecting Isaac to be hidden away somewhere, so the first chapters where she takes him out to work and through checkpoint barriers and on public transport was odd. I was also annoyed that the book was implying that music and singing seemed to be banned but Isaac listens to music on his CD player and she herself has sheet music openly out, which made little sense. I then got confused as to why, when singing was so bad, her son would just sing in the open, with seemingly no care for the consequences. The second half of the book tries to explain this with flashbacks and much needed exposition, but it seemed a little too late by this point.

It's certainly a unique premise, and you can tell that author Barnaby Martin is a composer with a love for music, however a lot of the science and exposition of the story felt very dense to get through and did not grab me as a reader. There was far too much of a ‘tell not show’ technique which left me disengaged with it. The ending reveal was far too obvious, and I just didn’t feel like the plot was going anywhere - the ending chapter really muddied the waters and confused me with what had just happened. I’m unsure if it was trying to set up for a sequel but it felt like far too little had actually happened in the book itself to warrant setting up the next instalment.

Overall, The Quiet sadly did not hit the right notes for me – with a confusing story which did not match the marketing and an ending that made little sense. Thank you to NetGalley & Pan Macmillan for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

LINKS TO BUY

Amazon UK

Waterstones