Silence by Michelle Sagara

[lightreads]

Silence by Michelle Sagara

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Teenage girl discovers she can see the dead, stuff happens. I liked the way this book walked with grief. Our narrator lost people, naturally, but it wasn't about that in some dramatic, weeping way. And it wasn't about pain. It was about grief, which is an exponentially more complicated beast.

Still, this lost me. Partly it was YA nonsense – leaden bickering, stupid POV tricks, that sort of thing.

I also had this whole train of thought about the autistic best friend, and how I would reserve judgment* on the way he is immune to certain kinds of magic, but how there is something labored about the presentation of disability in this book, like he never gets to be a person, he is always, always, always an autism-delivery-mechanism and we've got to stop to narrate about autism for a while, but, I just don't have it in me tonight, sorry.

* Were I to continue the series, which eh, unlikely.




View all my reviews

Comments

[cahn]

Ah, that's too bad. She has a really awesome series of LJ posts up about her son with Asperger's, which made me want to read her books.

(I did stop two pages into one of her epic fantasies -- although I'm willing to chalk this down to not being able to read epic fantasies anymore.)

[lightreads]

Huh, yeah, I didn't do any googling, but that doesn't surprise me. It all reads like it was written by someone who cares a lot about people with autism. Which is fine, I just didn't need the infomercials about how every little symptom works in my fiction, y'know? (1) I already know, and (2) she could have gotten a quarter of that information in much more organically, and it would have been fine.