The gripping, moving story of a mother and daughter’s quest to uncover a dark secret in the Alaskan wilderness, from the New York Times bestselling author of Sister and Afterwards.Thrillingly suspenseful and atmospheric, The Quality of Silence is the story of Yasmin, a beautiful astrophysicist, and her precocious deaf daughter, Ruby, who arrive in a remote part of Alaska to be told that Ruby’s … remote part of Alaska to be told that Ruby’s father, Matt, has been the victim of a catastrophic accident. Unable to accept his death as truth, Yasmin and Ruby set out into the hostile winter of the Alaskan tundra in search of answers. But as a storm closes in, Yasmin realizes that a very human danger may be keeping pace with them. And with no one else on the road to help, they must keep moving, alone and terrified, through an endless Alaskan night.
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Wow! Lupton offers a master class in suspense in The Quality of Silence. Every decision the heroine makes, while eminently reasonable, increases the stakes for the characters and brings danger ever closer. This book was a nail-biter and I don’t think I dared to breath until I finished the final page. Excellent!
Extremely unbelievable and unrealistic . A person does not just happen to be able to start driving an 18 wheeler anywhere. And to tell us that this woman is driving it on a highway of ice is beyond belief. And it just goes down from there. Please. Do some research.
Great read- but the ending seemed sudden. Deaf child and Mom flee to be with the father whom is declared deceased in accident.
FIVE AMAZING STARS!
I bought the hardback due to this opening paragraph:
“It’s freezing cold; like the air is made of broken glass. Our English cold is all roly-poly snowmen and “woo-hoo! it’s a snow day!”–a hey-there friendly kind of cold. But this cold is mean.”
The writing is so vivid you feel as though you’re in the Alaskan sub-zero weather. The POV of the deaf ten year old is fabulous! It’s a bit on the “do I really believe this?” side as far as plot (a woman who’s never driven an 18 wheeler steals a semi and drives it on solid icepacked roads and during a blizzard) The end leaves a little to be desired, but I didn’t care…I was lost the minute I read the first page with this tweet by the little girl who goes by “Words_No_Sounds” on Twitter–> “EXCITEMENT: Tastes like popping space dust: feels like the thud-bump as a plane lands; looks like the big furry hood of Dad’s Inupiaq parka.”
Whoa.
The plot wasn’t what drew me into the book. The unbelievability of parts of it didn’t deter me from reading. I was mesmerized by the sheer beauty of the words and the way the author brought the 10-year-old girl to life and gave me a better understanding of what it’s like to the hearing impaired. It also brought to light the controversy of fracking I wasn’t aware of.
Beautiful words. Beautiful novel. I would have given 5*s if the plot would have been a bit more believable. As someone who’s been around 10 wheel trucks most of her life, driving an 18 wheeler on an icepacked road in a blizzard without ever being behind the wheel of one is a bit unbelievable.
The main character is a deaf preteen girl. Very interesting and informative.
Too long….while I appreciated the story, learned a lot about the technology for hearing impaired and thought Ruby was an incredibly smart, brave young lady, the story could have run a bit faster, I stuck it out, but was honestly somewhat disappointed. Sorry…
What a great book. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Kept looking outside to make sure the sun was still shining. A little confusing at the end, but we’ll worth reading.
Lots of twists and turns in this book. I sometimes had a problem keeping up, but it was very enlightening for how the world is for the deaf.
Intriguing layers to the story, about fidelity, mothering a deaf child, native Eskimo culture and ecoterrorism. While the story starts seemingly slow, it is a well spun tale that pulls you in. Enjoy the ride!
The book is mostly set in Alaska during the sunless days of winter, so almost the whole story takes place in the dark. Within the darkness – stretching for mile upon unending mile – is an unrelieved snowy waste of ice and blizzard which you would expect to form a barren and boring setting for the story, but doesn’t. No, the darkness and snow provide an amazingly impactful background, terrifying, wild and dangerous but also beautiful, awesome.
A mother and her daughter travel through this tunnel of energetic bleakness to find her husband, believed dead by everyone but them.
The daughter is profoundly deaf – conversation is via sign or a computer type-to-speech program. The potential of this to inhibit the flow of the story was enormous – it ought to have been distracting and laborious, like watching film with sub-titles. But it wasn’t. By alternating the point of view between mother and daughter the reader is privy to both their thoughts, their individual take on unfolding events. Conversation flows, understanding blooms.
Within the darkness and silence the bright bubble of the truck cab is all their world and ours. Action, relationship, character and story all shrink to that tiny, vital world. It is polished and vibrant and multi-faceted, like a precious jewel. The story is tremendously exciting; a predatory fracking company, the malign presence of a tanker stalking them through the tundra, mysterious emails depicting strangely mutilated animals and the sharp grief of loss. But the important thing about it is the growing understanding between mother and daughter as they both come to terms with her deafness and her choice not to use her physical voice.
While sight and sound are all-but excluded from the book, other senses crowd in to take their place. The book has a sensory richness I did not expect and which the writer expertly extracted from the constraints she placed upon herself. The impact of cold – intense, extreme cold – is beautifully and powerfully depicted, also the impression of the hugeness of the invisible landscape, the claustrophobia of the cab, the comfort of a friendly voice on the CB radio.
Towards the end the story bursts into action, but rather than being a relief I found these chapters rather stilted and mechanical. They wrapped up the story – villains revealed, mysteries solved, questions answered – and had some pointed things to say about the fracking industry which I guess we should all consider very seriously. But, for me, the story had already concluded. I could easily have done without the more conventional action-packed denouement or the political inferences. The crux of this book was all in the title.