Customer Reviews

The Other Side of Silence

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Another fine book from Margaret Mahy dealing with the complex emotional lives of teens. Hero, the silent one, struggles to deal with her loving, but clueless family of geniuses. Mom is well-known author on childhood genius (based on her own children's lives), Dad is a stay at home mom, her older sister uses her gift for math and physics to wreck cars and her brother is a secret script writer for a steamy soap opera. Amid this chaos Hero lives two seperate lives, an inner life of fantasy adventures and outer life mostly defined by her voluntary decision not to speak, which puzzles and frustrates her family.
A chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor lady at once expands Hero's scope for innocent fairy tales while at the same time forcing Hero to confront the darker side of the fantastical. As her curiosity takes her into the neighbor's own bizarre life she learns the awful consequences of living a fairy tale and the differences between voluntary and involuntary silence.
Plenty of plot and not without touches of humor, Hero's quest to unite her innner and outer selves provides a thoughtful look at growing up and finding one's own voice in the world.

A difficult but rewarding story, and it reminds me of some of Jan Mark's latest books and of FIRE AND HEMLOCK by Diana Wynne Jones. If anyone else has noticed this, I'd love to hear from them.

I didn't like this book. It was just too weird.

Hero, 12 is selectively mute (selectively mute as distinguished from electively mute in that the person speaks in specific instances to certain persons). She was named for a character in Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Her siblings have the odd names of Athol, 23 Ginevra, 21 and younger sister Sapphira comprise the family along with their conventionally named author parents Mike and Annie. Annie is a lover of words and Ginevra follows in her footsteps by writing a book about how intelligence is stimulated by vocabulary enrichment. Sapphira gets on everybody's nerves with her use of arcane words such as "collieshangle," "cogger" and others.

Ginevra returns home with boyfriend and baby on the way; Hero is hired to work in her neighbor's garden and do light housekeeping. Plenty of weird things take place in this book and the girl in the attic was just too implausible to be taken seriously, even on a literary level. The ending is just as bizarre as the rest of the book. Forget this book. There are better books about elective (choosing not to speak) mutism and selective (speaking only under specific conditions) mutism.