The world building is cool.

The central conceit: assuming there is a on/off switch for language (the ability to conceive of it/speak it/hear it) in the brain, what would happen if a significant percentage of the population's was turned off?

Never answered in any definitive or focused way. I was left with a lot of specific and binary questions about what the story meant linguistically, culturally, scientifically, socially, etc.

The first quarter was too busy. And maybe it's the breaks with three authors, but I can't with the many alternating narrators.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one. I read it as a book, not as it was originally published in app form (because screw you if you didn't have an iPhone two years ago), so I'm not sure how that impacts my reading (in long chunks) vs. the intended ten to fifteen minute blocks.

There's just a huge variance in tone--there's little background details of advances in culture and society that are extremely well-thought out, nutrients loafs and music services and discounted car rentals for being implanted with a chip that makes you incredibly thirsty whenever you see a certain brand of drink. But there's also shitty pseudo-science and a dude who gets into hand-to-hand combat with a hoard of wallabies that he had previously been raising for meat. He is unable to defeat the final wallaby, and so they bond and travel across the country together. And this is a keystone character. If anyone's the protagonist, it's the wallaby guy.

But the authors also do fun things with the characters, giving you first-person perspectives from multiple people, often on each other. You listen to one person wax poetic about the nobility of his mission, and then someone else chimes in that he's really in it for the attention. (Though this is somewhat problematic, as there's a theme of secret-shameful-homosexuality involved. But then there's also group orgies.)They explore that it means to be human, what it is to communicate, if it is human to speak or if speech is just an imprecise funnel for concepts and depths of emotion that are eventually stifled, left to wilt, unnamed and unexplored. If the silents are less than human because they cannot speak, or more, because they do not need to. (All while being tragicomically aware of how hippy-dippy that sounds.)

Maybe this worked better doled out in pieces, slowly, inviting the reader to savor it. Maybe I would like it more if I re-read it. It just felt very unwieldy, sprouting legs in weird places and shambling around.

4 for most of the book.
3 towards the end - it dragged a little.

I'm eager to talk about it so... that's something.

The premise seemed really good, I enjoyed about the first 200 pages, and after that I was reading more and more slowly, and finding other things to do instead of reading it, and I realized I no longer cared how it ended, so I didn't finish it.

Way too long to read as an actual book - I think I would have liked it better as an app because I see how it would have worked that way.

I was under the impression that this book is a horror. But as the chapters flew by, it quickly become clearer that it was more Sci-Fi than anything. I enjoy Sci-Fi/horror anyway, and since I don’t have very many of those, I’m always game to dive in. However, I felt that this book went way too long for my taste and it didn’t have the sustainability to keep a reader like me.

In here, we find a generation of children without voice and no means of communication. It was as if they were born without that part of their brain. Parents, doctors, scientists were confounded. The children can’t speak, and unable to make any sounds at all. They were shunned by other children who can speak, treated as if they were mentally handicapped. But the worst part of all was that they were vulnerable to predators. Case in point, a kid who was abducted while shopping in a mall when he couldn’t scream for help.

Told in part as chronicles of testimonials, The Silent History contains a world whose ability to communicate vastly changed. Half of the world spoke in a telepathic manner but was not taught and can’t be learned. Though this book is 500-some odd pages, I found myself racing through 50% of it. It was a fascinating world, one where half the population scrambled to learn about a new kind of language all together.

However, it doesn’t take time until I found myself lost — not in the story, but literally lost. The plot quickly becomes convoluted. With the discovery of nanotechnology that enabled the children to speak, the Science of it all complicated what was an otherwise absorbing story. And as the cure was slowly introduced, so were the factions that contributed to the chaos. It was harder to keep track of the number of points of views — and there were many.

The cure, while great on the surface, became a bone of contention for some parents and the government. After the kid was saved from the sexual predator that kidnapped him, the government instituted a law that aimed to protect children under the age of 6. They made it a law to have all outfitted with the cure. And while I can understand why the parents would want their kids to have the ability to speak, I also saw why some parents were against it. In essence, the cure would invariably change their children into different people altogether. Some chose to let the children decide for themselves as adults.

This book is full of weird characters and at times they got too weird for me. There’s also a lot of characters and it got hard to remember them all. The concept of the book, that kids are being born silent, is what interested me in this story. The story is told through testimonials which was odd at first but nonetheless ended up telling a story. However, near the end things started to happen that I felt were far fetched for even this sort of dystopian novel. I also felt like the story dragged on for longer than necessary. I ended up going with three stars though rather than two because the characters were well written as was the story line.

An exploration of what people assume is better and how they pursue it.
"It doesn't matter what you do. Organize a parade...Set a couch on fire. A force calls to you, you follow, but the tail you're chasing is your own."
"So I can banter with chattering fools-so what?"