The Quiet and The Loud follows George who finds the life around her apart from when she is on the water in her kayak. Her best friend Tess is pregnant, her other friend Laz is protesting for the climate and her dad who she hasn’t seen in years is trying to get in touch to talk to her. Then she meets Calliope where things feel safe and quiet. This book is set in Australia during the wildfires in the summer of 2019, that were particularly bad across all parts of the country. This is a YA book but I would definitely suggest it’s for an older YA audience with many of the topics it tackles and discussions that are held throughout the story. My copy has content warnings in the front and I would recommend reading those before picking up these include domestic violence, emotional abuse, anxiety, addiction, depression, PTSD, complex PTSD and catastrophic fires.
Throughout the course of the book we follow George’s perspective in the current time period, as well as flashbacks to the past moments of relevance and descriptions of what I think are George’s paintings scattered throughout, which are cool to see. I liked that instead of being told what happened we did get flashbacks to these relevant times because it gave us a greater understanding of how George felt in these moments and what long term impact they have held. The descriptions of paintings isn’t something I have ever seen in a book before I don’t think and it was really interesting to see and I liked having those after key moments that held a strong emotional impact to George and us as readers.
Along with following George we see a lot of both her mums, her best friends Tess and Laz who are both at very key moments but very different moments in their lives and George sometimes feels stuck between and Calliope who George has just met but is desperate to learn more about. Some of these characters I found I absolutely loved and others I found that I had to remind myself of where they were in life because I found that I wasn’t all that big a fan of them even after telling myself that.
One thing I liked and I think made the book to be as powerful as it was is that the author isn’t hesitant to show the negative sides to her characters and how that impacts those around them while also not making anyone out to be a villain. We see why people have an issue with them and at times that means that we aren’t fans of them but at the same time none of them are ever portrayed as all bad or shown to be a completely negative person, we see the positives to them too which is a really important thing. We also tackle a lot of hard hitting topics with these characters head on, we don’t skirt around it, we see these issues and how they impact the characters directly.
For a lot of the book especially in the middle I really struggled with Tess’s character in specific for a few reasons but the main overarching one being the way she treats her friendship with George, something we learn isn’t new but only gets worse as the story goes on and the baby is born. Quite often it feels like she is neglecting to remember that George is her own person with her own wants and desires that don’t always line up with hers which is fine, but George sacrifices so much for Tess without complaint and Tess always thinks it's not enough or she should be doing more. We do come to understand why and see George start to stand up for herself and say no but it doesn’t take away from how I felt about it for the majority of the book and neither would I say is it enough to cancel out how big of an issue it felt to me.
I really liked the support that George got from her step-mum Mel, it was great to see how strong their bond was especially with how much was going on around them. It allowed George some really much needed adult guidance and help dealing with everything that had been loaded onto her at once but nobody really seemed to notice how much it is for one 18 year old girl. George’s family was amusing to read about at times and I quite frequently enjoyed the scenes with the four of them all together, even if you can understand why things aren’t always easy in that house.
Calliope was also a great character to have added in and I think if we hadn’t had her George wouldn’t have figured out how to manage her friendship with Tess because she wouldn’t have had the external pressure that was placed on her, not negatively by Calliope. She supported George but knew when to draw the line and make it clear to George what she wanted, versus what George thought she was giving, versus what was actually happening.
With all of our characters we were exposed to a variety of hardships that so many face and it was done in a real and honest way that didn’t make it feel like they were there for the sake of it and that Helena Fox truly wanted to give these characters the best she could even if that meant putting them in some really tough situations.
This included the wildfires that are entirely based on what was going on at the end of 2019 and how much climate protesting was going on. This was an extremely powerful thing to discuss, especially in the way that characters faced it and I am grateful for the increasing number of books like this that are touching on this issue that is affecting every one of us even if not to the same degree and I think Helena Fox is a very important and key writer in this space especially for YA readers due to the way she can present things like this without hiding things or making them seem less serious than they are and for that reason I do honestly think we should be discussing her books more because they along with others are possibly the best way we can get this message across.
One key thing I liked and haven’t already touched on, and possibly the reason I picked this book up in the first place is the kayaking that George does, during the book, but specifically at the start before the smoke becomes a major issue in Sydney. I kayak on a regular basis and it is possibly on a par with reading as to how important it is to me and my life, especially at the moment so when I saw a book with a kayak on the cover I knew I had to read it, and it is one of the few I have read that does include this making it specifically special to me. Helena Fox mentions in the acknowledgements someone who helped her add this into the book honestly and portray everything going on correctly which I think she managed to do. The title refers to the effects of being on the water in a great way that I immediately connected to and as someone who is very frequently anxious and thinking about a lot the effect that kayaking has on what’s going on in my head was portrayed really well and perfectly showed how everything is quiet and you can just focus on the water and what’s going on around you, often along with how the boat is moving. Seeing this in a book was just really special to me.
I think I have discussed almost everything I felt about this book during this review, it is definitely significantly longer than most of my other ones and I don’t think I’m missing anything else that I knew I wanted to talk about. As I have possibly already implied I highly highly recommend this book to all audiences but especially those in the upper YA bracket. I could not rate this book anything but five stars after finishing and I cannot wait to see what Helena Fox releases next along with reading How it Feels to Float.
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