Book Review | The Silent Patient | Alex Michaelides | A Clean Mind Wrecker with a Marvelous Ending

I don’t even know where to begin. So let’s just begin by saying that make sure you sit down somewhere while you are flipping through those last few pages or you might lose grip of the ground underneath your foot. We’ll talk about the ending in while (no spoilers, don’t worry :P), now a little bit about the plot first. Alicia Berenson is accused of having killed her husband Gabriel based on the fact that she was found standing beside the tied dead body of her husband with a gun in her hand. Gabriel was shot five times in the head and Alicia’s fingerprints were the only fingerprints found in the gun. And Alicia has kept silent ever since. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital named the Grove where forensic psychiatrist Theo Faber comes in, hopeful that he can help her speak. But that will not be easy.

I went into this one knowing that it definitely will be a 5-star read for me and so it was! If you loved thrillers like The Woman in the Window, you have my word that you’ll love this one. The character development right from the beginning is done so beautifully and in such manipulative fashion that you develop sympathy for certain characters. You become so invested in their emotional journey, and you might as well relate to it. Never even once did I feel that the writing was becoming draggy, which I did feel for some really highly acclaimed thrillers. Throughout the book, I had such a layer of underlying mistrust on top of all the characters in my head that I knew whoever it was in the end, I won’t be surprised at all. But guess what, I was wrong. I was totally wrong! Okay so for a while I thought I had a clue where this was going, but in the end shattered all my expectations like shards of broken glass. It was mind wrecking!

The book talks a lot about what effect can a bad childhood have on people, and it is the childhood that eventually shapes a person to become the person who he/she really is. The prolonged emotional trauma of an abusive parent-child relationship often comes out as an outburst at some point in life, sort of an outlet, just throwing away all the cluttered anger. That longing for love and care still persists and we try to find that in our other relationships. As Theo says, despite everything we say out loud, we become mental health professionals not to help others, but to help ourselves.

Needless to mention, this one is a clear 5-star for me.

Happy Reading!😇

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