I think we’ve all had a time in our life when we’ve had a disagreement with our partner or a friend and decided to give them the silent treatment. From my experience it never works out, probably because most of the time the other person doesn’t even realise what you’re doing!
What would you do if the silent treatment lasted for longer than you had anticipated though, if hours stretched into days and then into weeks? What would happen if you didn’t speak to your spouse for six months?
This is the situation Frank finds himself in, he hasn’t spoken to his wife Maggie for six months. Maggie is the love of his life, so immediately you’ll find yourself wondering what could have happened to get them to this place where they are still living together but he just refuses to talk to her.
The Silent Treatment is in essence a love story, but one that is wrapped in so many different layers of heartache and sadness that you have to unravel before the light of love can shine again. You’ll join the two of them as they reminisce about how they met, their early years of marriage and then ultimately discover why their world started to fall to pieces.
The journey is told through both Frank and Maggie’s perspectives, you’ll hear from Frank in the first-person narrative and from Maggie through a series of journal entries she leaves for her husband to discover. As the story unfolds your heart will break knowing how everything could have turned out differently if the pair had not kept secrets from one another thinking they were each doing so to protect the other.
This is a bit more of a slower-paced read than I’m used to, but I enjoyed that about the book and still found myself wanting to read a bit further than I had planned to so I could uncover a bit more of the story before closing the book for the night.
The Silent Treatment by Abbie Greaves is available from bookstores and online retailers for a recommended retail price of R310.
Thanks to Penguin Random House for sharing this book with me.
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