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?