Eli Horowitz

This book has 3 different authors and several character narrators. It read like a mixture of The Stand and World War Z with a smattering of Geek Love thrown in for good measure.

The collective narrative is set a couple of decades into the future and concerns the events that follow a spate of births of children born without language. The narrative takes the form of recordings for an oral history project.

It did flag in places. I guess it did for the authors too since around these points the storyline got quite bizzare. The wallaby farm - I quite enjoyed that storyline. Anyway I pressed on to the end to find out what happened so I guess it held me.… (mais)

The way this book is presented is great, you get 2 nicely bound hardback books and alternate chapters from each. They also have pictures that kind of fit together at the start of each corresponding chapter. So the form is fun if a little inconvenient to carry around! There's very little explanation of what is going on, so it is a bit bewildering as you swap between tales from a pretty scrappy sounding circus troupe and reports from a not-quite-objective journalist. In the end it's more successful as an experiment than a story but I'm OK with that.… (mais)

It makes sense to compare this book to [b:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War|8908|World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War|Max Brooks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386328204s/8908.jpg|817]; they are similar, in that they both use testimonials to slowly paint a picture of an event.

I just loved the concept of The Silent History - all of a sudden children are being born without the ability to comprehend or create speech. I do love a good psychological sci-fi that posits a situation and then just goes with it. It was fascinating how different characters interpreted being Silent in such different ways (as a disease or disability, as just a new variation, as a message, as a return to "real humanity", etc.).

The Silent community has many strong parallels with the Deaf community, especially when it comes to the fight between seeing it as a disorder and trying to fix it with medical technology, and not seeing it as a personal problem but as one with a society that tries to "fix" everyone to make us all the same instead of changing the environment around us to allow everyone to participate equally. It was interesting to read about the range of parental reactions to having Silent children, where some would immediately embrace it and attempt to learn the "face talking" language that Silents use with each other, some would hold hope that their child would be able to learn language someday and would spend all their money and time on speech therapy, some would encourage their children to make other Silent friends while others would prevent their children from seeing any other Silents, some immediately jumped on a new medical "cure" while others were horrified that they should be expected to change their children at all...etc.

I didn't love all the characters, but I didn't really hate any of them either. I liked seeing the same event from different perspectives, it helped to empathize with each person. Everyone is trying to deal with this sudden and confusing situation as best they can, and we all have different coping mechanisms.

So, I really liked this book. And it's cool that it's an app too, but I don't think I really missed out on anything by not owning any apple products. If you want, you can just read a chapter a day and you'll have the same experience, pretty much.
… (mais)