The Silence Project

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With other women joining in and starting the community the term cult sprang to mind. The consequences of this turn malevolent and any good intentions that Rachel may have originally had were soon lost. I really enjoyed the descriptions of Emilia's contrasting experiences in the DRC as well. From still wrangling with her relationship with her mother and the Community, to violence and protests, exploring beautiful nature and falling in love. The description of the gorillas made me want to visit the DRC. I was excited to start The Silence Project as dystopian thrillers are some of my favourite genres of books. The plot follows the story of Emilia Morris: whose mother started a community of silence at the bottom of her garden when she was 13. When her mother and her followers burn themselves to death to try and inspire the world to listen, a worldwide phenomenon was born. But is this organisation following in the footsteps her mother created or is there a darker force at play? The first half of the book leads up to the horrific “Event” where Rachel and her followers set fire to themselves to try to get people to listen. I apologise if this is a spoiler but I think it is fairly obvious almost from the start that this is going to happen. This event is watched with horror by Emilia and her boyfriend whose mother is also part of the Community and sets fire to herself too. This event is pretty graphic and is followed by an act of revenge where Emilia and her father have to leave the village, go into hiding and try to rebuild their I lives.

My biggest fear as I write this review is that I don’t have enough superlative adjectives to do it justice or convince you to read it…but please, please do, I am not ashamed to beg you to! Let me now attempt to give you a little taste of what you have instore, when you read Carole’s debut. Emilia was such a genuine character, I felt like I was living the emotions with her as she described her side of the story. I know things that don’t fit with their narrative of what the Community ‘stands for’. I know things that they have worked extremely hard to suppress. I know where the skeletons are.The mental health statistics in this country are confronting. Our mission is to teach positive mental health strategies to help people become happier and more resilient. Now this is one Hell of a book! I was hooked. No kidding. I wasn't even half way through and I was raving about it to my book club and how much they're gonna love it. I think the story behind this book is incredibly powerful. While I've read a lot of books about cults, this one was quite unique in its approach and extremely convincing. Where it fell down, I felt, was in the decision to write the book as Emilia's biography of her mother. This format made the book dry at times, and dragged out parts of the story, especially in the middle. Wow! A book that could almost be described as dystopian because of the picture it paints of the world, and it is a world that seems to be within touching distance of our world now - which is what makes it chilling. And as for the beginning - a prologue that describes our 'voice' - Emilia, watching her mother set herself alight and burn to death. What follows is Emilia writing a book that will explain who her mother actually was.

Rachel’s messianic shadow looms heavy on all that happens after her, over the global actions of the Community as well as the lives of her husband and daughter. She is at once a malicious eminence grise and a scapegoat open to the projections of all. I've always found cults pretty fascinating, especially how people get drawn into them, and I think this book really captures how they are formed, and at times it did feel pretty true. Emilia Morris is celebrating her thirteenth birthday when her mother, Rachel, moves out, into a tent at the bottom of their garden. It is also the day that her mother stops speaking, and from that day on never utters another word. Drawn by her vow of silence and desire to ‘listen more’, other women join her. Soon there is a commune of women living down the end of the garden and they form the Community. They make efforts to spread their message to listen more, pulling off bigger and bigger stunts to spread the message. Then, eight years after Emilia’s thirteenth birthday, her mother and thousands of her followers set themselves alight in a grandiose statement, in what later becomes known as the Event. I adored the writing style. I'm a huge fan of books written like an autobiography or true crime, and this was executed superbly. So much so, I had to stop myself from conducting Internet searches throughout. The blend of fact and fiction really added authenticity.I was drawn to this book as I wanted to find out why a mother would suddenly leave her husband and daughter and move into a tent at the bottom of the garden and never speak again. Communication for the rest of her life was via letters and written messages. The Silence Project asks what it would be like to be the daughter of a woman who started a cult that changed the world, and takes the form of a fictitious memoir. The second part is where we along with Emilia Morris get to understand the community built by Rachel in depth along with other side characters. However, the book seems a little bit stretched to me another thing was me not being able to resonate with many things Rachel as a mother did in this book. For the last fifteen years he has devoted his energy to the importance of silence in the world. His work is grounded in the founding principles Rachel falls silent as she wants people to listen more and to talk less, to listen to each other and to listen to nature. Few can argue with this.

I cannot even put into words how real this felt for me. Like numerous times I was researching and looking on good ole Google to see if it actually happened. I am so so blown away by how this book made me feel. Dystopian telling of how The Community is allegedly fulfilling Rachel’s views, but Emilia isn’t so sure. The Community has tasked itself with correcting their perceived over-population of the world. Emilia reads her mum’s notebooks and she isn’t convinced, but she’s now trapped within The Community. Years later, Emilia herself joins the community. Her life then branches out in various directions, the second half of the book covering her life as an adult. Thank you to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours & Corvus for my lovely, gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone.

When she publishes her own account of her mother’s life in a memoir called The Silence Project, Emilia also decides to reveal just how sinister the Community has become. In the process, she steps out of Rachel’s shadow once and for all, so that her own voice may finally be heard. Selection panel review And in some respects that is the nature of this story - a sort of balancing act between the grounded and the melodramatic and extreme, for every out there moment a reminder that the 'author' is just an ordinary person telling their life story in extra-ordinary circumstances. Many years later Emilia begins to write an account of her mother’s life, but she has no idea the animosity that this will stir up. However, she’s determined to carry on, if only to bring closure for herself. Hailey writes in a way that continually negotiates and challenges our perceptions and boundaries: between protest and responsibility, silence and voice, listening and hearing, the particular and the universal. In her novel, ‘Spring, Ali Smith writes of boundaries not as places where two places separate, but as where two points meet and meld, and this resonates here. Rachel is many Rachels.