book review the silent patient

The Silent Patient

By alex michaelides.

"The Silent Patient" by Alex Michaelides is a mesmerizing psychological thriller with enough trickery leads that leave the reader in awe of the author's talent.

• Evocative Writing Style: The writing style depicts emotions, causing a deep connection with the story.
• Gripping Psychological Thriller: The unexpected turn of events increases the psychological tension of the readers.
• Exploration of Mental Themes: The novel portrays trauma, mental health, and the depths of the human psyche.
• Predictability: Some readers anticipated the plot twist, reducing the suspense.
• Restricted Exploration of Secondary Characters: The poor exploration of the actions and thoughts of the secondary characters limited their contribution to the story.
• Slow Pacing: The buildup of the plot may feel sluggish, and some readers lose interest before the pace picks up.

Bottom Line

"The Silent Patient" expertly combines suspense with mental struggles analysis. Despite some predictable elements, the plot dives into human psychology, creating a compelling read that educates the audience.

Rating [book_review_rating]

Continue down for the complete review to The Silent Patient

Article written by Fave

B.A. in History and International Studies from University of Ilorin, Kwara State.

“The Silent Patient ” holds the reader’s attention with its strong concepts of mystery and obsession. As the layers of the narrative disentangle, the plot takes unexpected turns, challenging the presumptions of readers.

Although the award-winning book pleased many, some have argued that the conclusion was known from the early part of the book. Others have criticized it for having underdeveloped characters, affecting the story’s depth and relatability.

Psychiatric Silence

Alicia Berenson is introduced at the beginning of “ The Silent Patient .” Thought to have an enviable life, she surprises the public by shooting her husband in the face multiple times and becoming mute. When admitted to a psychiatric facility, she is named the “silent patient.”

Central to “The Silent Patient” is the theme of trauma and its impact on victims. The book reveals that silence is a reaction to unresolved trauma and pain, using the character of Alicia. Using the characters of Gabriel and Kathy, the theme of trust is highlighted. They cheat, shattering the confidence and self-esteem of their partners. Theo Faber’s obsession with uncovering the truth reveals trust as a fragile and dangerous concept.

Mental illness is another theme in the book. The story explains the stigmatization that accompanies mental health issues. Art is used as a form of expression. While Alicia Berenson keeps mute, she shares her thoughts and experiences using paintings.

The writing style explains the emotional and psychological depth of the characters. The structure shifts from Alicia’s diary notes to Theo’s investigation and thoughts, increasing the suspense.

The plot excellently creates the narrative of “ The silent patient “ by merging Alicia’s current activities at the Grove with Theo’s struggles to get her to communicate. “The Silent Patient” climax is an exciting revelation that discloses the entangled knot of manipulation and deception. Successfully, the author challenges perceptions of love, sanity, and truth.

This psychological thriller entices readers who enjoy gripping tales. Lovers of “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins and “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn will be delighted by Michaelides’ ability to keep them speculating until the concluding pages.

Layers of Mystery

The central characters of “The Silent Patient” assist with Michaelides’ aim to educate the audience on mental health struggles. Alicia Berenson, the formal “silent patient,” is a painter confined to a mental institution after she brutally kills her husband and goes mute.

Using Alicia’s refusal to speak, Michaelides adds to the story’s mystery. Her thoughts are, however, revealed in her diary. There, she gradually exposes events leading to her husband’s murder. Alicia’s character plays a vital role, compelling readers to understand the reason for her silence.

Fascinated by Alicia’s works of art, her muteness, and the murder case, Theo Faber is determined to break her silence to discover the truth. His persistent pursuit of the truth significantly contributes to the story’s development. As the principal narrator, Theo’s analysis and personal struggles add depth to his character.

By employing different narrators and interlacing their perspectives, Michaelides creates a collage of false accounts that intensify the suspense and add layers of complications to the plot.

Thriller’s Modern Classic

Published in 2019, “The Silent Patient” is a remarkable debut novel that garnered global praise and left its mark on the world of literature. The book explores the inner workings of the human mind and delves into trauma, guilt, silence, and the restoring power of therapy. As Alicia’s therapist, Theo Faber probes her history, the novel takes surprising turns, showing the extent of human resilience.

One major strength of the book is Alex’s writing style. He expertly describes the emotions and thoughts of the characters. By creating an emotional connection with words, the author makes the readers feel despair, joy, and tension. The thoughts of Alicia and Theo provide an insight into their motivations and fears. Alicia’s diary entries eventually reveal why she killed her husband and Theo’s contribution to the murder.

Another strength of the book is the storyline. As “The Silent Patient” nears the climax, the narrative presents revelations that challenge the assumptions and thoughts of the readers. The unexpected twists draw readers into the mystery, creating a fascinating read.

Additionally, the novel addresses themes related to mental health. These themes highlight the impact of guilt and trauma. The analysis of the way repressed trauma can shape reality makes the story more intriguing. The focus on psychological themes transforms the novel from a typical thriller to a thought-provoking narrative of the delicate nature of the human psyche.

“The Silent Patient” achieved exceptional success, enthralling readers worldwide. Its multilayered storyline, carefully crafted characters, and suspense amassed acceptance from the public. The novel’s expert development and its review of complex psychological themes have strengthened its position as a modern classic in the thriller genre. “The Silent Patient” also impacted the literary world by motivating a new wave of psychological thrillers.

Underwhelming Experience

Although quite a popularly accepted literary piece, it contains several areas for improvement that have interfered with readers’ utmost enjoyment of the reading experience.

One of the crucial weaknesses of “The Silent Patient” lies in the plot. The story of Alicia Berenson, who gets constrained to the Grove based on murder and mental struggle, is slowly revealed with little originality. Many readers have thought the repetitive therapy sessions predictable and unnecessary. The continual movement from Alicia’s past (using her diary entries) to her present disrupted the flow of the story. Although this narrative style aims to build suspense, it becomes an obstacle, leading to an incoherent reading experience.

Another criticism is the poor exploration of secondary characters. The book centers on the protagonist, Theo, and Alicia, the silent patient, leaving the secondary characters unexplored. These characters contribute to the plot yet are deprived of backstory, restricting their impact.

Additionally, the slow pace at the start of the book may create a sense of impatience. For readers who prefer a faster-paced plot, the gradual unfolding of the narrative can affect their overall enjoyment of the novel. Some readers may lose interest after the first few pages.

Lastly, the book fails to deliver a gratifying conclusion. While aiming for a shocking revelation, it produces a rushed ending that leaves readers with unanswered questions and a sense of disappointment. Professional critics have also argued against the book’s lack of depth and inability to elicit authentic emotions from readers.

Varied Reactions

At the end of “The Silent Patient, ” the author’s captivating style intrigues the reader. Yet, some readers may have been disappointed by the resolution, as the book took turns that challenged their assumptions at the story’s beginning.

Regardless of its potential dissatisfaction, the book is well-known for its creative use of suspense and its skillful depiction of complex characters.

The Silent Patient: Alex Michaelides' Psychological Thriller

Book Title: The Silent Patient

Book Description: 'The Silent Patient' is an absorbing psychological thriller with clever twists that takes the reader on a mysterious journey into the profundities of a disturbed psyche. The author creates a haunting atmosphere using the silence and mystery of the central character, Alicia Berenson.

Book Author: Alex Michaelides

Book Edition: Celadon Books edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Celadon Books

Date published: February 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1250301703

Number Of Pages: 336

• Writing Style

‘The Silent Patient’ is an absorbing psychological thriller with clever twists that takes the reader on a mysterious journey into the profundities of a disturbed psyche. The author creates a haunting atmosphere using the silence and mystery of the central character, Alicia Berenson.

• Evocative writing style
• Gripping psychological thriller
• Exploration of mental themes
• Predictability
• Restricted exploration of secondary characters
• Slow pacing

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Fave Ehimwenma is a proficient writer, researcher, and content creator whose love for art and books drives her passion for literature analysis.

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How a Failed Screenwriting Career Forged a Best-Selling Author

Before he wrote “The Silent Patient,” Alex Michaelides tried and tried again to make movies.

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By Elisabeth Egan

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“I don’t know why I’m writing this” happens to be the first line of Alex Michaelides’s debut thriller, “The Silent Patient,” which is now in its 46th week on the trade paperback best-seller list. This statement appears in a character’s diary, but one can imagine it crossing the author’s mind after his screenwriting ambitions fizzled.

“It was a pretty checkered career, to be polite,” Michaelides said in a phone interview. “I made three films and they went from bad to worse.”

He declined to name the movies (they are listed on IMDb ), but explained that “one was so bad it didn’t get released,” another went straight to DVD and the third had a brief run in theaters.

“I was at a party in Los Angeles and I was talking to somebody and it turned out he’d actually seen a film that I’d made,” said Michaelides, who grew up in Cyprus and now lives in London. “He went, ‘Wow, having seen that film, I didn’t expect you to be so interesting.’ It was at that moment when I thought, ‘I’m going to give up writing films. I’ll finally write that novel that I’ve been putting off for 25 years.’”

With Agatha Christie as his inspiration, Michaelides got to work on “The Silent Patient.” He approached the project casually, so as not to feel undue pressure (“It was just this stack of pages I carried around”). He quit drinking while he was writing the first draft, and meditated three times a day for 30 minutes. “If you go to bed sober and you’ve meditated and you’re thinking about the book, it permeates your dreams,” he explained. “You stay in the river, so to speak, for weeks at a time.”

Four years later, a month after his 40th birthday, Michaelides sold the book. Not only has it been a stalwart across hardcover, paperback and audio best-seller lists, “The Silent Patient” has inspired a slew of #BookTok videos with 14 million viewers. A movie is in the works. The sale of the film rights provided a nice full-circle moment for Michaelides, who is now grateful for the “edge of desperation” that pushed him into the book-writing arena in the first place. “I’d spent a lifetime trying to meet these producers,” he said. “When the film rights went to auction, a few of them who will remain nameless, who I had been desperately trying to meet for years, got hold of my cellphone number and were calling me at 11 o’clock at night and were trying to persuade me to sign with them.”

Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”

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Book Review: The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides

May 19, 2024

Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.

Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations―a search for the truth that threatens to consume him….

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides was actually the first book that ignited my love for thrillers. This book is amazingly well-written with its well-rehearsed plot combined and the intricate characters. It is a compelling read with its intense twist that I never saw coming. 

The Silent Patient is a psychological thriller revolving around the silence of Alicia Berenson, a famous painter with a seemingly perfect life. Her life is turned upside down when she is found standing over her husband, Gabriel’s bloodied dead body holding a gun. Ever since then her mouth hasn’t summoned any words, she hasn’t spoken for years. She was entered into a psychological facility, and here came Theo Faber. A psychologist with a certain fascination with Alicia’s case. As Theo dives deeper into this mystifying case, a web of lies and deceit starts to unroll.

I really liked how Michaelides wrote the character Alicia Berenson. She was always entangled in mysterious connections and her mysterious silence captivated me from the beginning, compelling me to uncover the reason behind it. As I delved more into Theo’s background in the book his story seemed to perfectly align with Alicia and her vow of not speaking. It was really interesting to see his struggle with Alicia and her psychological problems. 

The plot was fabulously written, and I was highly engrossed throughout every chapter. Each word was written meticulously, leading up to the unimaginable twist that left me pondering. The writing style of Michaelides is very sharp and witty, hitting every point in a tone that sends the message very clearly. The themes of betrayal, lies, deceit, and relationships were intricately woven, creating the perfect blend for a thrilling novel. 

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.” ~ Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

The twist was obviously my favorite part of the novel as I wouldn’t have seen it from a mile away. It was something completely out of the ordinary that I would have never guessed. I loved how Michaelides made sure to leave very vague hints just barley pointing to what the ending would be. Almost like a puzzle, or a labyrinth the reader has to find their way out of. 

One thing I did not particularly enjoy about the book was the side story of Theo and his significant other Kathy. Their ending was the missing piece of the puzzle that I would have really liked to know about. 

Overall, The Silent Patient is the perfect novel for a rainy, thundering day. It’s the perfect concoction of twists and turns that will have you clenching the book and holding your breath every page flip. It’s a must-read for fans of psychological thrillers as it will leave you hanging on the edge of your seat. 

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Awards & Accolades

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

THE SILENT PATIENT

by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.

"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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More by Alex Michaelides

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by Alex Michaelides

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SEEN & HEARD

Our Verdict

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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