Breaking the Silence

Diane Chamberlain is a gifted author and this is a truly stellar book! I literally could not put it down.Set in 1998, Laura Brandon, 40 is coping with the death of her father, Carl Brandon who was a gifted astronomer. He leaves with her a deathbed request, which is to check in on a woman named Sarah Tolley. Ms Tolley is a widow in a nursing home and she has the beginning stages of Alzheimer's.Curious, Laura tries to figure out her father's connection to Sarah Tolley. Her husband Ray, champion for the rights of homeless people and her daughter Emma, 5 round out her current family. Laura's mother died in 1966 when she was 8.Ray is adamantly opposed to Laura visiting Sarah. She refuses to back down and goes out to meet the mysterious Sarah Tolley. They immediately form a bond and Laura learns a lot about Sarah's past. Sarah had been married to a lovely man named Joe Tolley and her late Aunt Jane had a crippling case of agoraphobia. As a nod to her aunt, Sarah becomes a psychiatric nurse and has many horrific tales to share about the hospital in which she worked in the late 1950s. She also had a daughter named Janie who was born in April of 1958 whom she is trying to locate.When Laura returns home, she is greeted by a mute and traumatized Emma. Ray had shot himself to death and left a very unsettling note. In dealing with the aftermath of the man's suicide, Laura has to help Emma work through her trauma. Emma stopped speaking when she found out what Ray had done.Eight months slog past and Emma still isn't speaking. Emma's therapist is very encouraging and even invites Sarah to join them for Emma's sessions, which turns out to be a good thing. Emma has developed a real terror of men and think all they do is scream and shoot themselves. She won't even play at a friend's summer house when the girl's father is present.Again, Sarah Tolley might have more insights as to what caused Emma's fears to segue into more fears. She and Emma bond.So does a man named Dylan Geer. He receives a call from Laura, literally out of the blue and denies the claim she makes. He has a successful hot air balloon touring business and he wants to keep his life attachment free. His current girlfriend is a selfish whinebag named Bethany. More than once I wanted to kick Bethany in the shins. Laura counters Dylan's anger by sending him a picture of Emma. Once he sees that picture, the world changes for him."Breaking the Silence" is a masterpiece. Sarah's tales of horror about atrocities committed on psychiatric patients in the 1950s bleed over into 1998, which is when this story is set. She is the glue that binds Dylan, Laura and Emma as well as Emma's very astute therapist. Their stories are heartwarming and this book might make you cry. Just a warning.At the risk of sounding corny, I am going to miss these characters. This book gets nothing but accolades from me.The Fifth Dimension's 1967 classic "Up Up & Away" could be the soundtrack of this book.

Breaking the Silence by Diane Chamberlain is a story of secrets and the links that connect us. Laura Brandon made a promise to her dying father. With his last breath, he desperately made her promise to visit an elderly woman, a woman she had never met before. In fact, she hadn’t even heard of her before. Sarah Tolley is a woman who suffers from Alzheimer’s and only the distant past remains as vivid as ever. Laura sees visiting Sarah as a small sacrifice to honor her beloved father. But her husband, Ray, doesn’t want her to go, claiming Sarah wouldn’t know if she came at all and certainty her father wouldn’t either but Laura insists. Keeping her promise results in another death. Ray commits suicide while she is gone visiting Sarah and their five-year old daughter, Emma, is home to witness it. Now Emma refuses to talk about it, actually she refuses to talk at all. Desperate and filled with guilt, Laura contacts the only person who may help. A man she has only met once. A man who doesn’t know he is Emma’s birth father. Will she be able to break Emma’s silence and discover the link between her father and Sarah?Ms. Chamberlain weaves stories of intrigue and inspiration. Breaking the Silence is no exception. It is a page turner, dealing with heavy topics such as suicide, Alzheimer’s, trauma and psychiatric treatments of the 1950s, this book does not hold back. From the opening pages, you are hooked to discover the link between Laura’s father and Sarah and why she hadn’t heard of this woman before. The reason behind Emma’s silence seems pretty straightforward and even takes a backseat to Laura’s mission to find out who Sarah is to her father. Having read a few of Ms. Chamberlain’s books before, she heavily researches for her stories so when someone says something out of place or wrong, keep it in mind it may be the character's ignorance rather than the author’s mistake. I have read many reviews that point out mistakes but I feel they fail to realize that 1) the book takes place in the year 2000, when many people still didn’t know a lot about Alzheimer’s, 2) that errors in the character’s statements are necessarily an author’s mistakes but a flaw in the characters’ understanding or 3) the error is a plot point or misdirection. Overall, I enjoyed Breaking the Silence and would highly recommend it.Breaking the Silence is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook..

Laura Darrow, 10 comets discoverer and famous Astronomer, followed her (adopted) father's wish to care for (her biological mother) Sarah Tolley. This death bed promise had dire ramifications as it had her self-absorbed older husband, Ray aka Gilbert, from Dr. P and St. Margaret Psych Hospital, commit suicide in front of his 5-year old step daughter Emma. Emma's therapy for PTSD/ selective mutism, and Sarah being the only person she would speak to via her Barbie dolls, led Laura onto a long path of self discovery of her mother, Sarah's painful life choices to escape Dr. P and Gilbert/Ray. Laura's outreach to Dylan, her one night stand and Emma's biological father was a refreshing breath of fresh air in this novel that placed all the characters on this life sized chess board back in order. A welcomed HEA ending for not only Laura/Janie, Dylan and Emma, but for her newly found bio-parents , John, Elaine, and Sarah and half siblings expanding Emma's family circle!Great plot and characters that made this novel gravity defying! The history of Cold War Governmental paranoid and participation in LSD Psych drug warfare and illegal patient torture against its own citizens was revealing. I was left wondering the outcome of Day's book tour, and quoting the Devil from the movie, 'The Advocate', most famous line, 'Vanity is my favorite sin.' A Must-Read novel!06/14/22- 06/15/22.

Great work!

El libro llegó dentro de la fecha prevista aunque me lo esperaba en mejores condiciones, pues el estado del libro no estaba como decía la descripción. Aún así todo muy bién!

Ich habe das Buch lediglich aufgrund des Klappentextes gekauft und kannte weder die Autorin noch die Art und Weise der Bücher, die sie schreibt.Es hat mich durch und durch gefesselt und war eines der ersten Bücher seit langem, bei dem ich einfach nicht aufhören konnte zu lesen!Nachdem ich jetzt lauter Klassiker gelesen hatte in Alt-Englisch, war es erfrischend und vor allem erfrischend einfach mal wieder ein Buch in "normalem" Englisch zu lesen :)Werde mir daher garantiert noch mehr Bücher dieser Autorin zulegen.

A good thriller sort of book. Loved the writing.! Its definitely worth your time..!

My second Diane Chamberlain book, the first being 'The Lost Daughter', which I'd enjoyed a couple of years ago. This book wasn't quite so good, but still an enjoyable read.The main character here is Laura, a woman driven by a successful career in astronomy. The story begins with the death of her father from cancer. His last dying words are to make Laura promise to find and look after Sarah Tolley, a resident of a nursing home, suffering from early stage Alzheimer's - a woman Laura has never heard mention of before.When Laura returns home she mentions this to her husband Ray, but he is dead set againt her delving into this mystery. Feeling she can't break her promise to her father though, Laura disregards Ray's requests to leave it, and begins to try to find the connection between Sarah Tolley and her father. This decision has disastrous consequences. Laura returns home one day to find Ray has shot himself while looking after their daughter Emma, who from this point onwards refuses to speak.The revelation of the past by Sarah Tolley reminiscing on their walks doesn't work very well for me here. The passages are just too detailed to be believable and this historical plot, although suspenseful enough, does seem a bit too far fetched to be believable as well. I'd worked out the majority of the connections way before they were revealed too, so perhaps the storyline is a tad predictable?While the past resolves itself gradually by talking to Sarah Tolley, the present day plot revolves around Laura trying to get Emma to talk again. Her therapist suggests getting in touch with Emma's real father, Dylan, and inevitably Laura and he begin to fall in love. This storyline is a bit schmaltzy, but what's wrong with a warm fuzzy glow inside from time to time!?All in all an enjoyable read, and I expect I'll return to Diane Chamberlain again in the future for a light, but page turningly, suspenseful, plot driven yarn, which she seems to be quite good at writing.