Silent No More

January 22, 2025

4.5 stars.

“You are not that important”

Maybe it was the state I was in while reading this or maybe it was the emotion packed prose in the book itself, but every time I picked this up I felt my chest tighten as if I could feel the grief stored within the characters. This book is ultimately about grief and how it is interwoven with every life experience you ever have. Whether that is grieving the loss of childhood or moments of your life, losing connections with people you were once close with, or in the worst way, grieving the loss of someone’s life. And through that grief, there rises guilt. Can you put the blame of the trajectory of someone’s life on any one thing or person? Was there a specific moment that determined how your life would end up? Is it your fault if you could’ve changed it, but didn’t?

This book is about sisterhood; it’s about the complexity of sibling relationships; it’s about coming to terms with the death of someone so intertwined with your entire being, born from the same womb, raised by the same parents, sharing many of the same life experiences. Your life is so heavily influenced by the people around you, and most of all, by your siblings. You grow together, you play together, you fight together, you cry together, and you heal together. Avery, Bonnie, Nicky, and Lucky were all close in age, their family fairly disgruntled with rocky and tense relationships, yet they had each other through it all. Until Nicky died.

As a youngest sister, and sibling of three, this book heavily resonated with me, me and my siblings went through a lot together and our dynamics shifted a lot over the years, each pairing of us having a very different bond and relationship. So, I can say with certainty that this was an incredible portrayal of sibling relationships. I loved every one of the characters, except maybe Avery until the very end.

Avery is by far the most outwardly ‘flawed’ of the sisters in the fact that she is also the one who seems the most put together, but that front cracks and shows her true struggles and not so great decisions. She is responsible for all of the turmoil she faces in her marriage but it all stems from something much bigger. And by the end I really did enjoy her character, especially after the scenes where she is talking with her mother. As the oldest she held so much self-inflicted responsibilities throughout her adulthood but that she had carried over from externally inflicted responsibilities in her childhood, reminiscing on what was sometimes nice but sometimes horrible. She felt very real, so real in fact, I felt myself get actually angry while reading her interactions with her sisters (one scene is particular). You can clearly see her wrestling with guilt. The responsibility she felt for her sisters never went away as they grew up. She struggled with so much on her own and finally seemed like she had made her way out of many of her problems from early adulthood. Yet, when she finally got to where she had wanted to, her little sister died. And she felt like it was her fault.

Bonnie, the second oldest and one of the middle children, was my favorite. She by far had the most traumatic experience involving Nicky’s death yet stayed kind and understanding towards her sisters. Her arc was so satisfying to watch and yet it was very complex. Her romantic relationship was very taboo in a way but that felt, again, very realistic. Nothing about her was picture perfect and she had her flaws as well, but she was the easiest to feel sympathy for and admire. Funnily enough, you would think (due to circumstances) that Bonnie might feel the most guilt regarding Nicky’s death. And, yes, it was traumatic for her, but not so much because she entirely blamed herself. She saw the situation as it had happened, she couldn’t have done much differently, yet she fights that guilt off every day. The guilt that, though more subdued, forced her out of normalcy, and forced her to face herself.

Lucky, the youngest, is a close second for my favorite simply because of how much I was rooting for her the entire time. I loved Bonnie already as a character from the beginning, but Lucky had the most fun, relatable, and realistic development in my opinion. She was, unsurprisingly, the one I found myself relating to the most, especially in her interactions with Avery which I found very reminiscent of how me and my sister used to be at our worst. But it was beautiful in a way. They could fight and scream and say the worst things they could think of, and they still always found their way back to each other. Lucky was avoidant, but her development was quicker, it was inspiring, and she didn’t let the guilt swallow her up.

This situation poses a very daunting question: How do you live your life when the person who had been by your side, throughout it all, is gone? The answer: You keep them in your heart, and you keep going.

The first page sums up the entire book with its poetic and raw nature. It perfectly describes the complexities of sibling relationships while hooking the reader in instantly. The reason this isn’t a perfect 5 star, however, is deeply personal. I felt the most engaging parts of the book were the very beginning, and middle-end. I know that sounds like the whole book but there was this one section transitioning the beginning into the middle that didn’t do it for me, I felt like some scenes were unnecessary in their descriptions, or at the very least I personally didn’t like them. But other than that, this was a genuinely incredible book. If you are a sister or a sibling in general (but mostly sisters) you should read this book.