Silent Echo
Author: Elisa Frelich
Genre: YA/Special People
Grade: D
Portia Griffin has been mute ever since she was born. Otherwise she has a good normal life. She has great parents and great friends top of which is her deaf best friend Felix but then one day Max walks into school and not only is Portia in love she has a voice! And boy is it a voice! Without giving too much of the story away Portia’s voice and her singing ability has the power to bend people to her will.
I read this for the Great Imaginations challenge and I can pretty much sum up reading it like this:
Me: (at 25%) Intriguing, this book is better than I thought.
Me: (at 50%) Wrong.
Me: (at 75%) Is this ever going to end? Am I a horrible person for wishing that Portia would just shut up already?
Me: (at 90%) It definitely works better if you think of it as straight up campy.
My two biggest problems with this book were unfortunately big parts of the book. Song and music is a hugely important part of the story but the fact was I couldn’t help thinking that the songs themselves were well, goofy. I actually really enjoy books and movies about music and I love to read lyrics but I was rolling my eyes at some of these songs and because they’re supposed to be so strong and such an important part of her power I couldn’t buy it.
My other problem was the resolution of the love triangle. I’m going to try to be vague but maybe some implied spoilers here…
Possible spoiler warning!
It’s iffy to have a love story in which one of the participants is being obviously effected by your “powers,” but to have one in which that person is abused by the main character, nearly murdered by the main character and then has their memory wiped so they have no decision making ability in whether they want to stay in the relationship.
I’m sorry. It was gross. I was hugely disappointed Portia chose to do that because I have to be honest if Portia had been a guy I probably would have thrown the book (okay, e-reader) into a wall but yeah, it was just as off-putting. It’s not true love. It’s abuse and it just really was the death-knell for Portia in my mind. This book seemed to end on a cliffhanger but I’m honestly not the least bit interested in going on in the story.
Recommend: No. I’ll admit it was an interesting idea about a subject matter I enjoy but there were just too many huge problems for me to recommend this one. Sorry!
Au