Book #36 of 2016:
Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan
Another take on the Count of Monte Cristo bit, where a person who’s been presumed dead actually survives and takes on a new identity in order to enact revenge. In this case, that person is a teenage girl, one of only three passengers to survive a horrific attack on a cruise ship. But the other two survivors, a US senator and his son, have told the press that a giant wave capsized the ship, whereas our protagonist witnessed armed gunmen killing all the other passengers (a fate she only escaped by jumping over the side and spending a week adrift at sea). She lied about her identity when she was rescued, and now four years later she reenters the senator’s life to expose his lies and find out what was really behind the attack.
Daughter of Deep Silence is a thrilling page-turner, and I really liked the narrator’s continuing struggle of figuring out who she is and how that differs both from the role she’s playing to everyone else and from the girl she was before the tragedy. There’s a lot of good stuff here about a survivor’s mentality and what it takes to come to terms with something that has ravaged your whole life. The narrative creaks a little in its early sections when everything is happening exactly according to the heroine’s plan, but it strengthens considerably as things go off the rails and she has to decide what the best path forward for herself truly is.
★★★★☆
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