Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan
Rating: ★★★☆☆
In the wake of the deadly devastation of luxury yacht Persephone, just three souls remain to tell its story—and two of them are lying. Only Frances Mace, rescued from the ocean after torturous days adrift with her dying friend Libby, knows that the Persephone wasn’t sunk by a rogue wave as survivors Senator Wells and his son are claiming—it was attacked.
To ensure her safety from the obviously dangerous and very powerful Wells family, Libby’s father helps newly orphaned Frances assume Libby’s identity. Frances has spent years in hiding, transforming herself into Libby, and she can no longer allow the people who murdered her entire family and Libby to get away with it. After years of careful plotting, she’s ready to set her revenge plans into motion—even if it means taking down the boy she’d once been in love with: the senator’s son.
The game has just begun, and Frances is not only playing dirty, she’s playing to win.
For a good portion of this book I was on the edge of my seat, absolutely enthralled with Frances’ journey and revenge. I was with her one-hundred percent. The people that wronged her deserved to be brought to justice. She had a plan, and she was going to stick to it.
If it had continued in this vein, maybe just for a while longer, I would have given this book a perfect grade. The plan was well thought out, well planned, and beautifully poetic. The suspense – even after I began to get annoyed (which I’ll get into later) – was superbly done. I was turning pages, unable to get enough, unable to stop. I had to know how it was going to play out and if Frances was going to get her revenge.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for Frances’ plans to break down. I couldn’t stand that she was allowing herself to have these feelings for a boy (Grey) that she thought was – at best – complicit by neglect in the death of everyone she loved and held dear. I could understand everything else that she felt and thought, but not this. If some boy, someone was complicit in such a tragic affair as Frances believed Grey to be, there’d be no forgiveness, at least not as quickly as Frances starts making excuses and reasons for him.
Granted, Grey does seem to be nearly as tortured about their whole history as Frances, but the fact of the matter is that his family survived the tragedy and then LIED about it. While Frances lost her parents, her friend, her life on that ship. Nearly isn’t close enough for me. And for this boy Frances changes all of her plans, nearly dying, nearly getting others hurt or killed, nearly losing all justice for those responsible.
And in the end that brought down my enjoyment of the book quite a bit. The cliff-hanger/make-up-your-own-resolution ending didn’t help much, but it was really the “romance” that was at the heart of my discontent. I agree that it needed to be there. Frances needed to find some reason – beyond her revenge – to actually live, but the way this one unfolded didn’t work as well for me.
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