The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Even if you’re not a fan of fiction or suspense thrillers, I highly recommend reading this book. I can’t be more glad that I picked this up. This is a page-turner I’ve read in a long long time. The writing by the author being more contemporary makes it so easy to read and not put it down until you’ve finished it. Another great thing about this book is that every chapter is just 3-5 minutes long which makes it more digestible and lets you take a break easily. However due to the great plot and the gripping writing it hardly came to that.
Let me briefly provide the plot of the book. It’s a story about a woman Alicia Berenson who’s accused of killing her husband by firing a point-blank and then goes silent for years after his death. Theo Faber, a psychotherapist decides to help and heal her. I think this should be a compelling tease to convince one to read the book. Haha.
You keep getting the feeling that the story of Alicia Berenson and the narration by Theo Faber is intertwined way beyond Theo just being her psychotherapist and wanting to help her. There are chapters containing the excerpts from Alicia’s diary which does give the sense of events described therein being from a previous time. But it’s not very clear right away that the chapters about Theo and his life with his wife Kathy are not happening at the same time as he’s starts working at the Grove and with Alicia as his patient. This might stump you as learn about it towards the end of the book. However, I think that’s part of what makes all this more intriguing. Another thing which keeps gnawing is the connection between Theo’s and Alicia’s story - why is he so desperate to help her, why does he not care about breaking all the norms of a therapist-patient relationship, the unique aspect of countertransference.
I’m going to simply wrap this up by saying that this is an exciting thriller that you’d not be sorry to have taken up.
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