31: The Weight of Silence

The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf, is every parent’s worst nightmare. Calli, rent mute by a traumatic event, goes missing in the middle of the night with her best friend, and her voice in the world, Petra. Calli leaves at the arm of her angry, drunk father, and Petra leaves because, the reader assumes, she is following Calli. However, this is not all true.

The storyline weaves through past and present and through flashbacks, and everyone has a voice in the book. I thought the different voices were interesting, and how each character was handling the tragedy, but the whole book just didn’t work for me.

I think this is too close to a nightmare of mine to really read the book and enjoy it. All I wanted to know was make sure that Calli and Petra were okay. I felt like there were parts of the story that should have been expounded on, and that parts were missing entirely (like the whole, “how did Petra get out of the house?”) thing.

I give this one a 6/10. I just did not love it, but again, maybe because it’s such a fear of mine.

12: Still Missing

Still Missing, by Chevy Stevens, is a book told in two parts – one chapter in the current present time usually done through therapy, and one in the past tense when she was abducted and held for captive for a year in the mountains.

This book scared the daylights out of me. I am so afraid of something happening to someone I love and not knowing where they are. This is truly one of my biggest fears – that someone I love will be taken and hurt and held captive. So, this may not have been the best book for me to read considering I am home alone ALL THE TIME! However, I’ve learned how to work our alarm pretty well in the past week!

Anyway, Annie is a Realtor and is running an open house. A man comes by, and looks harmless and nice and she shows him the house. Well, he abducts her and takes her to a mountain cabin. He keeps her there for a year, some awful, awful things happened (I cried. A lot.) and you know from the start that she does escape, since the present time chapters are written from the beginning of the book. She finally escapes (scary!) and takes herself to a police station. And that’s when the book gets really, really hard to put down. Because the investigation takes a turn, and you begin to think that maybe Annie wasn’t chosen at random… but maybe something much more sinister is going on here.

I really liked this book, scared or not. I found Annie to be a normal woman, who gets put in an awful situation and comes out with serious trauma and has to work through that. I found the ending to be powerful and I liked that it wrapped up the book. I recommend this book to anyone at this point. It’s been a week or so and I’m still thinking about it. I read it in record time – seriously cover to cover in one night. I could not put it down (probably because I was scared) and I had to know what happened in the end.

I give this one an 8/10. Great writing, great pace, a fantastic read for almost anyone.