Title: The Whispers
Author: Ashley Audrain
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: 3.75
Pub Date: June 6, 2023

T H R E E • W O R D S

Messy • Tense • Uncomfortable

📖 S Y N O P S I S

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbor­hood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.

Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney’s best friend, suspects something isn’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whit­ney’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone’s world unravel from her front porch.

💭 T H O U G H T S

I was not one of the people who loved Ashley Audrain's debut, The Push, however, after reading the synopsis for The Whispers I was intrigued and wanted to give this Canadian author a second chance. What I knew for sure was I'd get a plot that pushes the boundaries and delves deep into the darkest areas of the human psyche. And that it does!

Told from the perspective of four women, the entire story spans a week and touches on themes of motherhood and marriage, envy and desire, and womanhood and female friendship. It unearths the darkest and most disturbing thoughts, those little inklings many woman have, yet never actually voice. While none of the characters are very likeable, each perspective does offer something entirely different and allows the reader to contemplate their inner most thoughts and feelings. There is an underlying thread of mystery surrounding what truly happened to the boy running in background.

While nothing overly shocking occurs in The Whispers, it's filled with secrets and a whole host of twists and turns. It forces the reader to sit with some uncomfortable truths, which would make it an excellent book club selection. It worked for me so much better than The Push and while neither book was a favourite, I'll continue to follow Ashley's career and look forward to seeing what she'll write next.

📚 R E A D • I F • Y O U • L I K E
• suburban thrillers
• adults behaving badly
• examining motherhood

⚠️ CW: child abuse, emotional abuse, injury/injury detail, bullying, death, child death, grief, infertility, infidelity, mental illness, pregnancy, miscarriage, toxic relationship, toxic friendship, blood, medical content, medical trauma, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt, gaslighting, sexual content, cursing, alcohol

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"But this is the thing about miscarriage. It is not an event, something that once happened and has ended. Miscarriage goes on and on, follows a woman through her days and her dreams, and then she will have blissful split seconds when she forgets, when her brain can still feel the gratification of having that baby, until she remembers the baby is not hers anymore, and hasn’t been for days or even weeks."

"It’s amazing what you can learn about people when you’re more or less invisible. It’s the things they don’t want you to see that tell you the most." 

This was unfortunately a major miss for me. The non-linear timeline, the focus being on the most unredeemable characters, and the predictability of the ending truly disappointed me. 

I won’t go into a summary, but while I find this book to be raw and insightful, I didn’t find it especially well written or constructed. There are too many voices, too many timelines, too many unnecessarily jarring scenes that come off gratuitous for shock value. If the book is about womanhood and how hard it is, about motherhood and what defines it, about escaping what we thought we wanted for what we think we can live with… I understand the purpose of the book but found it poorly executed. 

Whitney and Blair are both monstrous, the husbands are all unfit, and the kids are uniformly forsaken for their parents’ petty whims. 

The ending was predictable and no one emerges from the text unscathed. So what was the point? What I’m sure started off as a character study ended up being more of a grueling race to the finish, which is actually where the story begins. 

I’m befuddled and let down, frankly.