Breaking the Silence: a story of twists and turns

Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain is a story of secrets and the links that connect us.  Laura Brandon made a promise to her dying father. With his last breath, he desperately made her promise to visit an elderly woman, a woman she had never met before. In fact, she hadn’t even heard of her before. Sarah Tolley is a woman who suffers from Alzheimer’s and only the distant past remains as vivid as ever. Laura sees visiting Sarah as a small sacrifice to honor her beloved father. But her husband, Ray, doesn’t want her to go, claiming Sarah wouldn’t know if she came at all and certainty her father wouldn’t either but Laura insists. Keeping her promise results in another death. Ray commits suicide while she is gone visiting Sarah and their five-year old daughter, Emma, is home to witness it. Now Emma refuses to talk about it, actually she refuses to talk at all. Desperate and filled with guilt, Laura contacts the only person who may help. A man she has only met once. A man who doesn’t know he is Emma’s birth father. Will she be able to break Emma’s silence and discover the link between her father and Sarah? 

Ms. Chamberlain weaves stories of intrigue and inspiration. Breaking the Silence is no exception. It is a page turner, dealing with heavy topics such as suicide, Alzheimer’s, trauma and psychiatric treatments of the 1950s, this book does not hold back. From the opening pages, you are hooked to discover the link between Laura’s father and Sarah and why she hadn’t heard of this woman before. The reason behind Emma’s silence seems pretty straightforward and even takes a backseat to Laura’s mission to find out who Sarah is to her father. Having read a few of Ms. Chamberlain’s books before, she heavily researches for her stories so when someone says something out of place or wrong, keep it in mind it may be the character's ignorance rather than the author’s mistake. I have read many reviews that point out mistakes but I feel they fail to realize that 1) the book takes place in the year 2000, when many people still didn’t know a lot about Alzheimer’s, 2) that errors in the character’s statements are necessarily an author’s mistakes but a flaw in the characters’ understanding or 3) the error is a plot point or misdirection. Overall, I enjoyed Breaking the Silence and would highly recommend it. 

Breaking the Silence is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook. 

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