Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I’m afraid I found The Silver Road formulaic and rather tedious. I
tried it hoping that the setting in Northern Sweden would give it
some atmosphere and originality, but it didn’t and I had to
struggle to the end.
The central idea is
oh-so-familiar. Lelle’s daughter has been missing for three years,
having disappeared from a bus stop one morning. Lelle’s marriage
has broken up as a result, he has developed an alcohol problem and he
obsessively searches the remote countryside looking for her.
Meanwhile, a dysfunctional mother and her teenage daughter move in
with a local, reclusive resident...and that’s pretty well all that
happens for at least the first half of the book. It’s all very,
very familiar stuff, it moves very slowly and I wasn’t convinced by
either the events or the setting, so even when things did begin to
happen I wasn’t really involved.
The prose is
adequate but tends to be repetitive and over-written in a search for
atmosphere, and finding a dreadful cliché in the first couple of
pages (“he knew the road like the back of his hand”) didn’t
augur well. It’s not terrible by any means, but it wasn’t good
enough to engage or grip me.
I’m sorry to be
critical but, despite the publishers’ claims, I didn’t find The
Silver Road either compelling or haunting. It’s an unoriginal
story in a setting which isn’t sufficiently well painted and I
can’t recommend it.
(My thanks to Corvus
for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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