I’m the friend of a dead girl.
I’m the lover of my enemy.
And I will have my revenge.
So you know that thing where you’re reading a book and about halfway through you start thinking to yourself, ‘Hang on. Isn’t this basically EXACTLY the same as Revenge, that super cheesy program that used to be on E4?’
Well, that’s what happened to me while I was reading Daughter of Deep Silence.
Don’t get me wrong - I really enjoyed reading it. It was fun and fast-paced and kind of melodramatic and I tore through it. It was fun. Like candy-floss is fun.
But it was exactly the same as that TV program.
So:
1) Ordinary teen girl has something bad happen to her which results in her becoming an orphan.
2) The bad thing happens as a result of the actions of a Family of Evil.
3) Girl swaps identity with someone else and spends years plotting her Ultimate Revenge.
4) Girl turns up in coastal home town of the Family of Evil to wreak her Ultimate Revenge.
5) Family of Evil happen to have a hot son.
6) Girl has to seduce Hot Son as part of her Ultimate Revenge plan. Because, I don’t know. Plot reasons or something.
7) There’s also a boy who used to be in love with the girl many years ago, just to gum up the works.
8) Girl and Family of Evil are both super rich. Like, ridiculously rich.
9) There’s a boat explosion.
I could go on, but I won’t. There are many, many similarities. To the extent that I was expecting the author to reference the TV show in her acknowledgements blurb. (She didn’t).
The other thing the book and the TV program have in common is that they are both pretty suspenseful. Both were cheesy, but had me on the edge of my seat at times, which made for a really exciting read.
There were times when we were expected to have a complete suspension of disbelief. Like the way Frances and Grey fell in love in seven days - like completely in love where they both spend the next four years not being able to forget each other. And their love affair seemed a hell of a lot more mature than that of two fourteen year olds. And Frances/Libby spent four years at boarding school and is now a master of revenge? Didn’t really ring true.
I’d recommend Daughter of Deep Silence, as it’s a fun read, but any potential readers will need to remember to leave any common sense of cynicism at the front door.
3.5 stars