The Story of Silence

Book Title: The Story of Silence

Author: Alex Myers

Date Started: June 10th 2022

Date Completed: June 24th 2022

Genres: Historical, Adventure

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

I kept going for a while with this book, but ultimately stopped because it had established itself pretty solidly and wasn't going to switch anything up - which was most of the disappointment to begin with; you're retelling a classical legend in which the protagonist is born a female, but is raised as and identifies as a male. How can you not make something out of that?!

The Story of Silence is a painfully straightforward retelling of a Medieval legend, in which a girl is raised as a boy. And that's kind of it. There's no meaning put onto the situation, no commentary and no 'point'. In theory, I'm of the belief that representation can and should be normalised and not have to be the main focus of the story. And yet, in a lot of ways, it is the main focus of the story. Silence doesn't have much of a personality himself, and the whole book is placed in a framing narrative with a sleazy bard pressing Silence and a few other people for the epic story of their adventures, which boils down to him wanting to put Silence into a box of male or female. Fine as a framing narrative, but things don't develop much from there.

Silence's main narrative tensions revolve around hiding that he's anatomically a female - or at least, the tension that comes as a result of other people worrying about that. Silence himself has actually quite little agency. And this isn't mentioning yet that everything else in the book falls into sexist stereotypes and narrow-minded tropes - something that the author literally acknowledges and basically shrugs off in his introduction. I honestly couldn't help thinking what the author themselves thought of Silence and his situation, his identity and the history of a story that could hold such marvellous potential for modern audiences.

Aside from everything else, it was really boring. It almost felt academic in its style and wasn't trying to establish any sort of exciting or even thoughtful tone. For a book so ripe for the very purpose of retellings (storytelling rooted in tradition but growing vibrantly in our contemporary understanding of these stories and our own human experiences), it sure didn't try very hard to do literally anything. What's the point of doing it if you aren't going to do anything with it?

A Great and Terrible Beauty

Book Title: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Author: Libba Bray

Series: Gemma Doyle #1

Date Started: July 2nd 2022

Date Completed: July 6th 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Mystery

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Two Star

Final Rating: Two Stars

Review:

While I really love Libba Bray's Diviners series, I really wasn't feeling this. There are echoes of Evie in all these narcissistic ambitious girls, but none of her complexity and depth brought out by the other varying characters in that series. Gemma felt like she was heading that way and then decided not to bother; I'm all for girls not having to be goody goody two shoes, but I don't feel like rooting for a petty bystander either.

I'm not a massive fan of boarding school settings for exactly this reason - it's just petty bullying and whining and hardly any stakes, all justified by the amazingly basic revelation that bullies are humans and often have their own insecurities. Something which becomes even more infuriating when this is used to completely excuse their behaviour. It's not a massive surprise to me that I didn't like any of the characters and found it very hard to feel for them, even the ones being bullied who only then cared about being part of the clique and routinely become petty and spiteful to stay in the populars' good graces. I was hoping for something dramatic but was mostly expecting it to be the supernatural force after the girls. That, sadly, turned out not to be very dramatic.

The plot relies too much on convenient appearances from random characters so that the scene doesn't actually have to play out to its peak of tension. You'd like this was leading up to some massive reveal to the mystery thrown in our faces the whole way through, but alas, the mystery itself ends up feeling pretty trivial and easily solved (if you hadn't worked it out in the first couple of chapters).

All the above are honestly pet peeves of mine, but I've been known to get along with novels that feature them before. The problem with A Great and Terrible Beauty was that there felt like there were no stakes at all. Every time something creepy or mysterious happened, it was suddenly cut short or resolved immediately, with next to no build-up. And you complain all you want about how restrictive corsets were (which is factually incorrect) or women's lack of power, but for all the scandalous rule-breaking every single woman in the story seems to be a part of, no one seems to experience any consequences whatsoever. You've got scandalised unmarried women having new identities for themselves, moving into flats by themselves, with apparently no means at their disposal. (And yes, there is supposed to be a supernatural power after these girls - but who would know from how little it's in it).