Title: Silence is Goldfish
Author: Annabel Pitcher
Genre: Contemporary YA
Format: E-Book
Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Orion Children’s Books
Publication Date: 8th October 2015
My Rating: ★★★ (3 stars)
Goodreads | Storygraph
Synopsis
My name is Tess Turner – at least, that’s what I’ve always been told.
I have a voice but it isn’t mine. It used to say things so I’d fit in, to please my parents, to please my teachers. It used to tell the universe that I was something I wasn’t. It lied.
It never occurred to me that everyone else was lying too. But the words that really hurt weren’t the lies: it was the six hundred and seventeen words of truth that turned my world upside down.
Words scare me, the lies and the truth, so I decided to stop using them.
I am Pluto. Silent. Inaccessible. Billions of miles away from everything I thought I knew.
Tessie-T has never really felt she fitted in and after what she read that night on her father’s blog she knows for certain that she never will. How she deals with her discovery makes an entirely riveting, heart-breaking story told through Tess’s eyes as she tries to find her place in the world.
My Review
Tess Turner has just discovered something terrible. In six hundred and seventeen words her life changed, and she feels her entire world crashing down around her. She responds to this discovery by retreating into silence.
The theme of the novel is what appealed to me, it was about how our identity is shaped and what constitutes as the ‘real’ parents, is it the one who shares your DNA or the one who raised you. These are questions that are thread through this novel and are dealt with in-depth.
However, I couldn’t relate to Tess. She has a strong relationship with her parents but instead of talking to them, she bottles everything up. I struggled with connecting to her and her viewpoint.
