The Whispers by Ashley Audrain

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (3.5/5)

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

About 325 pages

The Whispers tells the stories of four women (Whitney, Rebecca, Blair, and Mara) living on Harlow St. Mara is an older woman who feels disconnected from her young neighbors and her husband. Blair is the picture-perfect stay-at-home mom, but lately, she's felt a sense of longing for something more. Rebecca is an extremely successful ER doctor who desperately wants to become a mother but has suffered several miscarriages. And Whitney is a career-driven woman with three kids that she isn’t very interested in. Rumors are continuously whispered on their street. Especially when Whitney is caught screaming at her son, Xavier, at a neighborhood barbecue. The whispers get louder when months later, Xavier is hospitalized after “falling” out of his bedroom window. As we read about what happened in the months leading up to the incident and the days after, we learn these four women are more entangled than they seem.

This was a solid mix between a family drama and a thriller that I couldn’t put down. The pacing in the beginning was slow but picked up dramatically about halfway through. I loved trying to figure out the deeper connections between the women, and Audrain did a terrific job building a lot of tension in the book. She also tackled a lot of the complexities of womanhood in an impactful matter. Her other book, The Push, is currently on my shelf and I’m excited to hopefully read that one soon! 

Favorite Quote: “They were broken, but they had not shattered together.”