Title: The Silent Daughter
Author: Kirsty Ferguson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
First published: November 10th 2020
Publisher: Boldwood Books
Finished reading: October 21st 2020
Pages: 336
DNF at 23% (77 pages)

“That was how she felt. Alone, adrift in a sea of people who looked like her, but she could never seem to find a way in with them.”

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by Netgalley and Boldwood Books in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

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I confess that this was what I now call an ‘oops’ request… I’ve learned my lesson not to browse Netgalley while still half asleep the hard way, that’s for sure! Somehow psychological/domestic thrillers haven’t really worked for me lately, and my negative reaction to The Silent Daughter might have had something to do with that… But there is no denying that I REALLY struggled with this story, up until the point I had to make the difficult decision to make this title my fourth DNF of the year. Since I threw in the towel at 23%, I don’t have much to say about the story to be honest… But I’ll explain briefly below why I made the decision to not finish reading this one.

First of all I do have to say that I find the premise of The Silent Daughter to be pretty interesting. The house fire, the secrets, someone maybe wanting the main character dead… It sounded pretty promising, but somehow the execution just didn’t do it for me at all. My first turn off has to do with the constant abuse and bullying taking over the rest of the plot. It’s a trigger worthy topic and I don’t mind it in my stories as long as it is well incorporated into the plot, but it was just way too much in The Silent Daughter. Instead of developing the storylines and adding more dept, we only got to see more and more scenes with abuse and bullying, and it seriously made me feel too uncomfortable and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. On top of this, there is the adult content. I’m never a fan of sexy scenes, but I can tolerate them when they are done right and that wasn’t the case here. Another huge turn off for me!

On top of this, I found the characters to be considerably unlikeable. Not liking the characters made it really hard to feel sympathy for them, and the over the top abuse/bullying scenes didn’t help either. The worst part was probably the plot itself though. Sadly, I found the plot to be an uncoherent mess (or at least in the part I did read). The story jumped between past and present and different moments in time without warning and this was not only irritating but made it really hard to follow the story itself. I wasn’t a fan of the tone or writing either… All in all unfortunately The Silent Daughter definitely wasn’t a match for me. I always hate having to make the decision to DNF, but sadly I saw no other way out here.

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