★★★★☆ Cliché, manipulative, but still surprisingly entertaining

Silent Scream

Angela Marson

I have noticed that many Goodreads reviewers are subtractors. What I mean by that is that they appear to evaluate books (or at least review them) by listing all the faults they can find, and then giving a low rating to those works that have lots of faults. In the alternative, adder, strategy, one looks for the good things in a book and gives a high score to a book that has lots of good stuff. I myself am mostly an adder (although I make no claim to absolute strategic purity).

I mention this because Angela Marsons's Silent Scream has serious faults. I'm going to mention a couple of them, but I nevertheless give it a four-star rating.

First, you should know (this is not a fault, but just something you should know going in), that Silent Scream is emotionally heavy. It concerns institutionalized children (mostly girls) who are abused in almost every awful way you can imagine. What's more, protagonist Kim Stone is herself a survivor of the same institutional horrors. So you're going to read a lot of child abuse.

One of my strangest reactions, as a great fan of children's literature, was that Silent Scream reminded me of a children's book -- this despite the subject being entirely unsuited to children. What I mean by that is that children's books are often crudely and transparently manipulative, in ways that make an adult reader exclaim, "Oh, man, you've got to be kidding!" Cute puppies and sneering stepmothers are thrown in with abandon as a supposedly subtle way of telling kids how they're supposed to feel. Silent Scream had that same feel to me, although for the most part the manipulation used more painful tools. (There are, however, puppies.) Marsons doesn't do subtle, at least not in Silent Scream.

Second, Silent Scream is a detective novel, a police procedural, and it has a defect common to many such novels. The protagonist, Detective Inspector Kim Stone, is a very, very bad policewoman, in the sense that she breaks rules with abandon and doesn't play nice with anyone. It is a cliché of the genre that only obnoxious, abusive cops solve crimes. In fact, it is their breaking the rules that makes them so good at solving crimes. If you've read a lot of police detective novels, you recognize the type. I have two problems with this cliché: (1) it glorifies bad behavior, and (2) it's a cliché, goddamnit!

So, why four stars? Well, it was fun to read. A lot of fun. I intend to keep on with the series. Partly that's because Silent Scream is the first novel in a series, and I hope that Marsons matures out of the clunkiness of the first novel as the series continues.

Silent Scream on Amazon

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