The Whispers by Ashley Audrain
Narrator: Jill Winternitz
Length: 10 hours 17 minutes
Published by Penguin Audio
Publication Date June 6, 2023
Genres: Thriller
Format: Audiobook
Goodreads
From the author of The Push, a thriller about four suburban families whose lives are changed when the unthinkable happens—and what is lost when good people make unconscionable choices
The Loverlys sit by the hospital bed of their young son who is in a coma after falling from his bedroom window in the middle of the night; his mother, Whitney, will not speak to anyone. Back home, their friends and neighbors are left in shock, each confronting their own role in the events that led up to what happened that terrible night: the warm, altruistic Parks who are the Loverlys' best friends; the young, ambitious Goldsmiths who are struggling to start a family of their own; and the quiet, elderly Portuguese couple who care for their adult son with a developmental disability, and who pass the long days on the front porch, watching their neighbors go about their busy lives.
The story spins out over the course of one week, in the alternating voices of the women in each family as they are forced to face the secrets within the walls of their own homes, and the uncomfortable truths that connect them all to one another. Set against the heartwrenching drama of what will happen to Xavier, who hangs between death and life, or a life changed forever, THE WHISPERS is a novel about what happens when we put our needs ahead of our children's. Exploring the quiet sacrifices of motherhood, the intuitions that we silence, the complexities of our closest friendships, and the danger of envy, this is a novel about the reverberations of life's most difficult decisions.
As soon as I finished The Push I wanted to read more by Ashley Audrain. With The Whispers Audrain did not disappoint.
It may sound odd but I think the best way to describe the novel’s slow burn of a plot is to liken it to the film Titanic. From the beginning, we know the Loverly’s son falls from an upstairs window, but what happened behind closed doors and, how did this supposedly idyllic, unbreakable neighborhood hit such a massive iceberg?
The Whispers is told from multiple points of view, through Blair, Whitney, Mara, and Rebecca revealing that motherhood isn’t always Instagram-worthy. The week leading up to the accident exposes the complicated relationship these women have with motherhood and by extension marriage. Perhaps it is because I’m childless by choice but I felt like there was a lot of focus on how motherhood defines someone and is the single path for a married woman. While Rebecca struggles with fertility and suffers numerous miscarriages I wish there had been a way to show that there is more than one way to create a family. Because of this feeling the middle of The Whispers was a little slow for me.
The end was fast and I felt like I was plunging into icy water. Like Ashley Audrain’s debut, The Whispers ends with a cliffhanger that has the reader wishing there were just a few more pages.
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