Friday, April 22, 2011 | By: Natalie

The Silent Land - Graham Joyce




Rating: 3 baseball bats
Favorite thing: Two words. Unlimited. Wine.
Least favorite thing: Not being able to taste the unlimited wine.

On the zombie how-to shelf?: Nope

The cover of this book is totally fantastic. If you slip the dust jacket off, you're left with different letters of the title on the book and different letters on the dust jacket. I puzzled over the letters on each for a while, hoping to find a word hidden, scrabble-like, in the letters, but even my scrabble dominating life couldn't find anything interesting.

As for the book itself - it had atmosphere, I'll give it that. Unfortunately, we're stuck in our atmospheric setting with two two-dimensional characters. You'd think that with only these two in the book we'd get them flushed out a little more than they were, but what we get is a lot of them being scared and bickering. Which, fine, they're in a confusing, terrifying situation, but if I'm to care at all about the ending I need to care about the characters, and I didn't, really.

I did have a night, right in the middle of the book, where I was loathe to put it down. Things were finally happening! Creepy things, and I wanted more! Unfortunately, the book lost a little of its momentum in the latter third and came to a stumbling halt at the end, which was pretty predictable. I just wish it had had a little more oomph into the ending, rather than just dribbling away.

A minor pet peeve of mine was tweaked every page of this book. Dialogue with no indicators of who's speaking for lines. Sometimes, if you have two characters that are well drawn and different enough from one another, this works. But our protagonists aren't different at all, especially at the beginning, and several times I had to go back and count the lines off - him, her, him, her... Which, annoying.

Overall, I did enjoy this book and I might think to pass it along to someone if they mentioned they liked ghost stories. Other than that, I think it's going to be somewhat forgettable.

2 comments:

Audra said...

I loooove your review format -- this is awesome times one million. I'm passing on the book, though. Hurry and review more things!!

atlantisflygirl said...

I've got a little something, at least. And I'm so not surprised you won't read the book. Audra and it are no where in the same sentence!

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