Book Review: The Silent Treatment

Abbie Graves
William Morrow, 2020
304 pages

Amazon Description:

A lifetime together. 
Six months of silence. 
One last chance. 

By all appearances, Frank and Maggie share a happy, loving marriage. But for the past six months, they have not spoken. Not a sentence, not a single word. Maggie isn’t sure what, exactly, provoked Frank’s silence, though she has a few ideas.

Day after day, they have eaten meals together and slept in the same bed in an increasingly uncomfortable silence that has become, for Maggie, deafening. 

Then Frank finds Maggie collapsed in the kitchen, unconscious, an empty package of sleeping pills on the table. Rushed to the hospital, she is placed in a medically induced coma while the doctors assess the damage. 

If she regains consciousness, Maggie may never be the same. Though he is overwhelmed at the thought of losing his wife, will Frank be able to find his voice once again—and explain his withdrawal—or is it too late?

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Thanks to TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of The Silent Treatment as part of the promotional tour.

If you asked me to describe The Silent Treatment in a few words, I would say it is an unconventional love story. It’s told in two main parts. The prologue gives us a brief hint at Maggie’s point of view, then the perspective shifts in chapter one to Frank, then switches once more to a third person point of view with an unknown narrator. I wasn’t sure what to expect since this is a debut novel, but I actually really liked it and would read more from this author.

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The action begins when Maggie overdoses and ends up in a coma. You learn pretty early on that Frank hasn’t spoken to her in 6 months, despite their happy forty year marriage. When a nurse encourages him to speak to Maggie to help with her recovery, he sees this as perhaps his last chance to tell her things he never shared, and reveal the reason for his silence. He begins at the beginning of their relationship and recounts to her the highs and lows of their journey together, giving her insights into his perspective and expressing his greatest joys and regrets. When the point of view switches at about the 70% mark, we see Frank finding and reading a series of journal entries Maggie directed to him in the days before her hospitalization, giving us a look at her feelings and motivations.

The two things that I liked most about The Silent Treatment is the unique way in which the story unfolds, and the characters themselves. It was interesting to me that it felt like such an active, forward moving story when there wasn’t actually that much happening. I think that momentum came from moving back and forth between his memories and his current reality, added to the mystery surrounding his silence. As for the characters, they were all the perfect mixture of flawed but likable. They felt very real and sincere in the way the interacted with each other and did life together.

I thought The Silent Treatment was an impressive debut novel and I think Abbie Greaves has a great career ahead of her. Two thumbs up!