Released in September of this year, House of Quiet is the latest novel by Kiersten White. This is the same author who brought us Mister Magic, Lucy Undying, The Dark Decent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, and Hide. Which is to say, the author of some of the best books I’ve read in the past few years.
House of Quiet is about a young woman named Birdie. She’s spent the last several years trying to find her little sister Magpie, who vanished after undergoing the mysterious Procedure. Birdie poses as a maid to get into the mysterious house of quiet. But what she finds there is a group of children who need to be rescued.
Today, we’re going to break it down and see why it works. Because there’s a lot that can be learned from this wonderfully dark, sweet tale.
Just jump in
The story starts in the middle of things. It starts with a mysterious woman wandering around the House of Quiet with a candle, bemoaning how loud it was.
We then jump to Birdie, heading to the house of quiet, thinking of all of the shady things she had to do to get there.
As we follow along, we only get an idea of the world she lives in and what she’s doing. We know that she’s grown up in crippling poverty. We know that she’s never speaking to her parents again. And that’s about it.
But that’s okay, because we’re going up to the house. We’re meeting the other new maids. We’re being drugged with tea. There is stuff going on, and there will be time to explain later. The important thing is that we’re not slowing down the start of our story. We are jumping right in.
Don’t over-explain
I spent a lot of this book trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. I wanted to know what happened to Magpie. I wanted to know what the procedure was. I wanted to know what had happened to Birdie’s friends. I wanted to know why Minnow was acting so strange.
And never once was any of this simply out and out explained.
No, the story was moving too fast for that sort of thing.
This was infuriating, but in a good way. Because everything is answered, eventually. It’s just that we have to piece things together as we go. Or, we find out as the characters do.
House of Quiet brought the ‘show don’t tell’ rule almost to its breaking point, but not quite. At no point did I feel so lost I thought I’d never catch up. But it wasn’t until near the end that I really felt like I knew what was happening.
This is a hard line to walk, giving just enough information for the reader to barely understand. But, I think the easiest way to do this is to have faith in your reader. Don’t feel like you’ve got to spell everything out for them. Leave some spaces for them to fill in the blanks themselves.
Anything can be used to world build
One of the most charming things about House of Quiet was the naming structure of the characters. People raised in poverty have animal names like Minnow, Magpie, and Birdie. People from the upper class have names like River or Forest.
This is a super quick and efficient way to give us information about a character with the fewest words possible. We know the character’s name, and we know what class the character is from. And in a book that is all about class warfare, that’s vital information.
This is a great example of using every element you can to world-build. Names, clothes, jewelry. Think about how all of these things impact our real world. And yes, you should be using any of these to show your world, rather than telling us about it.
Now, all this being said, this book wasn’t perfect. My biggest complaint, I think, is the relationship between the characters. They were, in my opinion, a little too sweet. They came together too quickly. They were too kind to each other. But, of course, this is a book for young adults. So maybe that’s why.
This was not enough to ruin the story for me. House of Quiet was a fun, heartwarming tale, and I enjoyed it greatly. If you haven’t read it yet, do it today.
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