The Other Side of Silence

By Margaret Mahy

Book Overview

As a member of a gifted, idiosyncratic, and argumentative family, twelve-year-old Hero chooses mutism until she reconciles the true with the real in her life. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670864552
• ISBN13: 9780670864553
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Viking Juvenile
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.2" x 0.7" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

Inner and Outer Lives

Another fine book from Margaret Mahy dealing with the complex emotional lives of teens. Hero, the silent one, struggles to deal with her loving, but clueless family of geniuses. Mom is well-known author on childhood genius (based on her own children's lives), Dad is a stay at home mom, her older sister uses her gift for math and physics to wreck cars and her brother is a secret script writer for a steamy soap opera. Amid this chaos Hero lives two seperate lives, an inner life of fantasy adventures and outer life mostly defined by her voluntary decision not to speak, which puzzles and frustrates her family.A chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor lady at once expands Hero's scope for innocent fairy tales while at the same time forcing Hero to confront the darker side of the fantastical. As her curiosity takes her into the neighbor's own bizarre life she learns the awful consequences of living a fairy tale and the differences between voluntary and involuntary silence.Plenty of plot and not without touches of humor, Hero's quest to unite her innner and outer selves provides a thoughtful look at growing up and finding one's own voice in the world.

a multi-stranded story such as I expect from Margaret Mahy

A difficult but rewarding story, and it reminds me of some of Jan Mark's latest books and of FIRE AND HEMLOCK by Diana Wynne Jones. If anyone else has noticed this, I'd love to hear from them.