Review: Some Quiet Place

SOME QUIET PLACE
Kelsey Sutton
Paranormal Young Adult
331 pages
Flux
Available now
Source: Finished copy from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Elizabeth Caldwell doesn’t feel emotions . . . she sees them. Longing, Shame, and Courage materialize around her classmates. Fury and Resentment appear in her dysfunctional home. They’ve all given up on Elizabeth because she doesn’t succumb to their touch. All, that is, save one—Fear. He’s intrigued by her, as desperate to understand the accident that changed Elizabeth’s life as she is herself.

Elizabeth and Fear both sense that the key to her past is hidden in the dream paintings she hides in the family barn. But a shadowy menace has begun to stalk her, and try as she might, Elizabeth can barely avoid the brutality of her life long enough to uncover the truth about herself. When it matters most, will she be able to rely on Fear to save her?

MY THOUGHTS
Some Quiet Place is a story that fully reflects its title, moving forward quietly and cautiously as we try to solve the beautiful riddle that is Elizabeth and her emotionally empty existence. It's certainly not a story that will appeal to all, the slower nature of it at times a touch tedious as we wait for a petal of romance or mystery to unfurl and reveal the striking color we know know is hidden behind Elizabeth's seemingly impenetrable facade, but the unusualness of the premise and the characters themselves easily pick us up and carry us through when we get stuck and find ourselves occasionally floundering.

Elizabeth is a young woman whom from the blurb we expect to be fairly lifeless and one-dimensional, her immunity to every Emotion keeping our expectations of her very low, but what we don't realize until we're in the middle of her story is how her lack of emotional response to various things serves to heighten our own. We feel a pressing desire to respond in situations where she can't or won't, taking on the sorrow, the fear, the guilt and the pain so as to catalog and record them for posterity, making sure the people who deserve those responses from her receive them even if they don't come from Elizabeth herself.

Elizabeth is not a shell of a person throughout though, showing moments and flashes of feeling when her mind stops reminding her of her emptiness and allows her heart to fill her many spaces, and we simply can't help but root for her and Fear to find the source of her condition so that we might know how she came to be the way she is. Luckily for us, almost all our questions are answered by the end, Elizabeth's journey one evidenced by a series of bloody footprints and pieces of herself left behind for us to find, but instead of there being nothing left at the finish line we find a distinct something–a young woman twisted and molded into different shapes by pain and loss but who emerges the most striking version of herself, ready to remove some of the weight from her shoulders through the acceptance of her past and her hope for the future.

Overall, Some Quiet Place is likely to be on of those stories that inspires a wide variety of conflicting opinions, perhaps a bit more of a mood read than a straightforward romance or mystery, but ultimately something rewarding in its haunting uniqueness.

Rating: 4/5 

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This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.