I am totally rooting for Charlene Carr. An Ontario girl who moved East, a bunch of degrees, aspiring writer, so basically me except competent and has actually managed to write some novels. Plus, Beneath the Silence is the first time anyone has solicited me to review their book. W00t w00t; I’m moving up in the reviews-for-free-books world!
Beneath the Silence isn’t the sort of book I would normally pick up. I realized that after I started reading it. The writing style is more mainstream than what I usually pick and the characterizations a bit more YA-styled than I generally look for. But reading it made me feel like seventh grade again. I’m not going to lie: seventh grade me swooned a couple of times. I can imagine being totally in love with Gabe, the way I was totally in love with a picture in the copy of The Eyes of the Dragon I got at a middle-school book fair. I would have reveled in the teen anger and angst of Brooke. I would have thought the names, Brooke and River Lake, to be the epitome of cleveness. As an adult, I can’t say I found the same sort of magic, but it let me pretend. Sometimes pretending on a rainy summer’s day is perfect.
There’s a lot of good in the book: it surprised me. I complain constantly about figuring out plot points pages before they happen. I did figure out some (like about the car accident and Molly), but there were other little ones that I wasn’t expecting (like at the house party, which had train-wreck written all over it, but ended much differently). There’s a completely mortifying period story, which makes you want Carr to be one of your girlfriends because she can tell a story like that. The book is uplifting. I know normally when a book is uplifting, I’m usually really down on it, but I willingly accepted the life-affirmingness of the story. It’s spiritual without being cloying; in a way, the book is a meditation on forgiveness.
There’s also the, I don’t want to say bad because it isn’t really bad, the mediocre: I’m not sure whether I believe all of Molly’s story, with the clichés of a hooker with a heart of gold, a tumble-down the stairs miscarriage, a prince in the wings willing to wait for our heroine. Believe is the wrong word again (there’s a reason Carr has managed to write a book while I sit here with a thesaurus trying to figure out what exactly it is I am trying to say). There was something about Montréal that was too pat. It’s like a tiny lump in a bedspread. You could just slop down and ignore it or you could be, like me, annoyed to no end by it.
Plus the book taught me there was an IMAX theatre in Halifax. I did not know that. So learning new things while expanding the type of books I normally read. Entertainment and information!
Beneath the Silence by Charlene Carr went on sale July 9, 2015.
I kind of received a copy free from the author in exchange for an honest review.
