Review of The Whispers by Ashley Audrain

*The Whispers* by Ashley Audrain (2023). Published by Pamela Dorman Books.

I’m honestly not sure of where I heard about this book first. I know for a fact I saw it on a list somewhere, which is why I ended up deciding to read it.

I think the synopsis was super compelling because I decided to order it immediately at my local library to be put on hold, and then I actually ended up reading it pretty quickly. It usually ends up taking me awhile to watch movies or read books simply because I’m lazy, so it’s impressive I read this book in one go.

It’s important to note that while I was drawn in by the synopsis, I was not impressed with the book itself overall.

I think I read the synopsis and simply expected a book that was different than this one was, which I can see how it happened. Before sitting down to read this blog post, I ended up going back to the original one on Goodreads and seeing where I went wrong here. I think I’m rambling already, so let’s wrap this introduction up.

Here’s my review and summary of the book!

When an accident happens in a wealthy suburb, lots of secrets rise to the surface.

We learn pretty quickly in this book that an accident has happened. There’s been a party at one wealthy family’s household, and when the matriarch, Whitney, realizes her son Xavier is missing from the party, she goes upstairs to see a crime.

He has stolen all of the goodie bags intended for the children and ate all of the chocolate, which upsets her greatly she ends up yelling at Xavier really harshly, and his window is open, so everyone at the party witnesses what she says to her son, which is pretty horrible considering the circumstances.

Things get even worse when at night, Xavier somehow falls out of his window and ends up in a coma at the hospital.

That’s when everything in this suburb begins to fall apart and the whispers begin. We sometimes pivot to the neighbor, whose husband dies in the novel and nobody in the neighborhood notices because of how wrapped up they are in their own lives.

This neighbor is one of the original inhabitants of the neighborhood before it gentrified, which was mainly a Portuguese working class neighborhood before all of these airheaded rich people moved in. She is the keeper of secrets, and she’s got a pretty big one involving her husband and her son’s death later on in the novel.

Then there’s Whitney’s friend slash neighbor, Blair. She suspects her husband is cheating on her, which, in fact, cheating becomes a big part of this book towards the very end. But it’s not what you’re thinking.

There’s also the doctor across the street, Rebecca, who is there when Xavier is brought into the hospital. She’s trying to get pregnant herself and keeps having miscarriages, and, as we read later in the novel, her marriage is becoming strained because of it.

Now, I likened this novel to something you’d find in a soap drama. Each one of these families has major issues that could be solved if they acted like more mature people, and a lot of these problems are fixable. Rebecca’s really isn’t, but her marriage kind of is.

Although Whitney serves more as the protagonist of sorts, I think she’s truly terrible and deserves whatever bad could happen to her towards the end of the novel.

I genuinely hated reading her perspective because she’s on another level of denial about how she’s involved with her son’s potential death.

But if we’re going to be honest, away with all these rich people and their problems. The most interesting story in all of this to me was the immigrant woman who serves as the bystander to all of this drama.

She has her own drama, sure, but she realizes these people are so caught up in their own worlds and have served as a reminder that the thriving community that once lived in these houses are gone. She’s not rich like these people, so they may never actually see her as equally as she sees them. That’s a real big scoop within this novel, and it’s sadly pushed to the side.

Overall Thoughts

This reads like mainstream fiction to me throughout the book, and while it is not my taste at all, I thought it could definitely be something other people like an enjoy. I mean there’s a reason this author is popular after I Googled her and learned a bit more about her work.

I don’t think I’d be trying to read another one of her books, but I commend her for making a novel that puts women’s perspectives above a male one. I love the fact it’s all women narrators talking about their lives and issues, as these are perspectives that were locked out of the conversation in literature for so long.

But because this wasn’t my cup of tea doesn’t mean it's not someone else’s.

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