Julsbookdiaries

Initial thoughts:

I finished this book late last night and gave it 3 stars on my Goodreads account. I would’ve given it 3.5, but you know, Goodreads. Anyway, I am still comprehending all that I read, but here are my initial thoughts.

This post most likely will contain mild spoilers, so beware!!!

I decided I wanted to start reading thrillers. Over the past few months, my most popular genres have been romance and fantasy, and I was interested in expanding my library. I asked a few people for some book recommendations and consulted BookTok. All of these sources led me to The Silent Patient. I had no idea what it was about, but I was excited to start!

We learn about Alicia immediately: she kills her husband and is now in a mental institution because she refused to speak after the murder of her husband. She has had some past instances of mental health issues, with hallucinations and delusions, so it wasn’t hard to convince everyone she was the murderer. 

In comes Theo, who is a psychotherapist, who followed Alicia’s story closely and with much interest. It almost felt like an obsession for him. He knew that she could not, or would not speak, so it was his mission to get her to. He took up a job where she was staying so he could get close to her and eventually become her one-on-one therapist. 

This stuck out to me as odd from the very beginning. Theo is obsessed with this story and this woman, so he quits his “better” job, to work at “The Grove”, which is the place Alicia is staying. On his first day, he immediately seeks her out in a group setting. He plants these little seeds in the minds of his coworkers for him to get closer to Alicia and “help” her. I thought to myself, what kind of ethical violation is this? There had to be at least one. As the daughter of a psychologist, it made me skeptical about Theo from the start, and as I progressed through the book, I learned that skepticism may have worked out for me in the end. 

The book details Alicia’s life, told sometimes by others, and sometimes by her diary that she kept in the months leading up to her husband’s murder. But, it also details Theo’s life, which took me out of the book a little bit. It all comes together in the end, I guess, but it made the beginning and middle of the book a little challenging for me. I was losing interest because I wanted to hear more about the sessions with Alicia, not Theo’s at-home vices. 

I gave the book 3 stars initially because it wasn’t a bad book, but it’s something that I wasn’t completely enthralled with. I added the 0.5 mentally because it is an interesting storyline, but the ending just fell flat for me. I couldn’t predict the ending personally, but my initial suspicion of Theo at the beginning of the book made me just want to skip to the end to see what would happen. There wasn’t much tangible evidence or information that added to this detective-like investigation throughout the book. The most tangible information came towards the end. I feel like if I got a few major hooks throughout the book, it would’ve made the reading process more enjoyable for me. 

Overall, I think it was an interesting book. I’m not sure if it was much of a thriller – it didn’t have me on the edge of my seat at all. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how unethical Theo’s character was and it started to annoy me a little throughout the book. His lack of ethics makes sense for his personality and what we find out at the end, but seeing that early on took me out of it a bit. 

Onto the next!

-Julianne ❤