The female voice for Alicia's extracts is quite annoying, and so is the narrator for Theo. I won't spoil it, but it's disappointing, and Alicia's silence is really unconvincing. I read to the end not so much out of enjoyment for the novel, but because I wanted to know what really happened. We didn't pick the book up to read about a failing relationship. 'The Silent Patient' is quite a misleading title, and the vast majority of the book revolves around the much less interesting subject of Theo's relationship with Kathy, an intensely annoying character. Come on, who's going to continue to write in their diary when you're under attack? There's no miraculous reason for Alicia's silence, which I think is a big factor in getting the reader to keep on reading. 'He's coming in, I can hear someone downstairs, they're here!'. The diary extracts read a bit like Pamela (again, in a bad way) with some ridiculous bits. At times it's laughable (in a very bad way). In other words, the author did some cursory research on it and then tried to make a book revolving around the subject. Theo, the psychotherapist, doesn't seem to have much understanding of therapy at all. But it's a disappointment - spend your money elsewhere. There's been a lot of hype over this book, which was the reason I went for it.
