"In the Quiet" was a gentle novel narrated by Cate Carlson, a young wife and mother who has recently died. Now she watches as her family mourns her loss.

While I could feel the pain her children and husband were grappling with and could sympathise with Cate as she watched them suffer her loss, I didn't enjoy this novel as much as I thought I would. It was slow and not a lot happened in terms of the plot. There were far too many characters and the number of times they smelled something was ridiculous. The author obviously enjoys describing scents! Unfortunately, this novel never resonated with me. ( )

The second book in as many months that I have read narrated by a woman, a mother, a wife, that has passed on to the great beyond. Would probably have passed on this if my good friend, Angela hadn't given this five stars. Which would have been a shame because this was simply a beautiful story.

Cate, not yet forty, has died, she doesn't remember how and hopes to find out as she watches her family try to come to terms with her death. She is able to see certain things, she has no control over what, or when. Time skips and jumps and in between we learn her back story and that of her family. Jesse, Rafferty, and Cameron, her children, her sister Bea, her friend Laura and her husband, all grieve in different ways, one has a big secret that is eating at him, and one feels responsible for her death.

Although there are moments of sadness this is a life affirming book, how they learn to go on wonderfully portrayed. Such great characters, I cared about each of them immensely. A quiet, meditative story, I appreciated the gentle way this story was rendered, with compassion and love. A sentimental story for sure but not written in a maudlin or dramatic way. The different ways they grieve but come together as a family, not without difficulties, but a new way to see their family as a whole. As I said, simply beautiful and touching.

ARC from publisher. ( )

Beautiful and heartbreaking. ( )

A nicely constructed novel, about grief, recovery and family. I wasn't that into the overarching conceit of the book, in which Cate, who has died, watches over her family and friends, and I could have done with a lot less of the horses, but this is otherwise a pretty impressive debut. ( )

I am not any sort of expert in these matters, and this may be a rather patronizing thing to say, but it seems to me that this is a remarkably good piece of work from a very young author. The way Ms Henry-Jones has chosen to tell this story, with multiple perspectives and continual jumps backwards and forwards in time, runs a grave risk of confusing the reader or at least hiding the story beneath the complexity of the story-telling. But Henry-Jones maters the technique beautifully. That said, I need to mention that any story which is told in the voice of a dead person, "looking down from heaven" as it were, can never get five stars from me. But that's my limitation, not hers. ( )