Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan is a revenge thriller with a hook that can’t fail to entice any reader. Frances saw her parents murdered aboard the yacht they were travelling on, by merciless gunmen who killed everyone on board. Everyone except the powerful Senator Wells, his son Grey, and Frances.
But they told the world that a wave washed the yacht away, and Frances is determined to seek revenge on the senator and his son, the boy she fell in love with on the yacht.
Captivating, right? I wanted to adore this book but it didn’t quite happen. I was instantly drawn into the first pages about Frances’ sea rescue and then we were catapulted ahead by four years, which really jarred on me. It was a jolt that I didn’t recover from.
Frances, now living under her dead friend’s identity to protect herself, promises us that she has a plan to wreak revenge.
But the ‘plan’ doesn’t seem as well executed as you may hope after four years of planning, and the book slumps from one encounter with the Wells’s to another with no real end goal in sight.
Frances herself is emotionally destroyed thanks to the experiences aboard the yacht, and she has lost all identity by living as her friend Libby, rather than finding a new life as her.
Her behaviour is questionable at times due to all that she has been through, but she does something so weird and disgusting towards the end of the book that I lost any feeling I had for her. I can’t believe the author put it in the novel!
So many things did not ring true for me during the book. Is it physically possible for a girl to survive being lost at sea for one week? Can 14 year olds really fall in love? How did the gunmen get aboard the yacht?
With all of these unanswered questions, I almost didn’t mind that the ending is slightly unclear because I wanted to get away from Frances.
One part of the story is tied up nicely, the other is left open. My advice is read this book for yourself to make your own mind up, and don’t question it as much as I did.
Do you like revenge thrillers?
