on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Read on recommendation from Uncle Larry
Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 323
Started: 29 October 2022
Finished: 29 October 2022
Summary:
Six years ago, Alicia Berenson tied her husband to a chair with a spool of wire and then shot him five times in the head. She hasn’t spoken a word since.
Theo Faber is a criminal psychologist—has worked in mental hospitals with the most dangerous of cases. Yet something about Alicia’s silence, which he saw in the news broadcasts of his trial, fascinated him, so he takes a job at the Grove, the facility where she’s being held. As he slowly begins to untangle the complexities of her mental state, he begins to realize that there is a sequence of events that leads clearly to her fate that night.
Thoughts:
(LOTS OF SPOILERS)
Oh. My. God. I finished this book in the dark at a sleepover and had to stay still, gaping up at the ceiling, for maybe 15 minutes before I could get over my surprise enough to fall asleep. This book was so good. The only thing lacking, in my opinion, was any poeticism of writing. Everything else was incredible. The narrators voice was perfect; so sympathetic and easy to hope the best for. The way the timeline was hidden was brilliant. The fact that there were parallel couples but they seemed to be totally unconnected was so cool.
Michaelides’s take on psychology was fascinating as well. The protagonist’s ability to sympathetically trace other characters’s behavior to childhood trauma seemed really interesting and kind at the beginning, but with the information revealed at the end, that Theo was actually tormenting Alicia in order to clear his own conscious, it became clear that Michaelides was actually warning against the dangers of trying to understand the human psyche.
I really enjoyed this book and hope to read more by Michaelides in the future.