"Park Tracey, the author of The Bereaved (2023), is a remarkable writer, and this book is another triumph. The character of Silence is a wonderful creation who endures a life suffering, doubt, and blazing anger, and readers will be invested in her fate. The archaic language and fine detail relate what it was like to live in a typical household of the time, all the household practices of everyday life, and how, for example, to prepare for long winters: Withal, the apples have been cut and dried, the apple-butter crocked, the cider pressed. Crane-berries and wild grape are gathered and dried. A historically astute and compelling must read." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Julia Park Tracey's Silence is a powerful, lyrical marvel of a novel. The challenges that Silence March faces and the questions that she struggles with after she has been sentenced to a year of silence by her Separatist community not only create a vivid and authentic picture of Puritan New England, but also resonate in meaningful ways with our own times. Silence's story is both haunting and inspiring, and I am grateful to Julia Park Tracey for having given her such a captivating voice.” —Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest
“I'm a huge fan of Julia Park Tracey. Her new novel Silence is a moving, transcendent novel in the vein of Groff’s Matrix and Toews’s Women Talking. Historical fiction, yes, but more importantly an inquiry into female agency and power in a world that takes the breaking of the spirit as its right. Beautiful.” —Christian Kiefer, author of The Heart Of It All
“Silence reads as if the author lived through the events that take place in the early days of the American Colonies, rather than so brilliantly imagining them. In fact, we do live through them, in the guise of Julia Park Tracey’s bewitching, wise, and delightful narrator, who must navigate a narrow, superstitious world, and who in the process learns that being punished by temporal silence can unexpectedly open a wide and loving universe.” —Sands Hall, Co-Director, Memoir & Nonfiction Program, Community of Writers, author of Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology
“Julia Park Tracey is a master of historical detail. Her deft eye brings alive the story of Silence Marsh, a woman whose unintentional acts bring persecution for the sin of female weakness so intense, it seems unbelievable yet true to the religious practices of early 18th-century America. The loss of her mother, husband, and child, her precipitous fall and subsequent rise with a man from the Age of Reason, cleaved me to her story and ultimately brought me to tears. I didn't want Silence to end!” —Julia Chibbaro, author of Redemption
“With a disarmingly restrained yet empathic prose, Julia Park Tracey introduces us to Silence Marsh as she wades through immeasurable loss and grief in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. However, it is her journey towards redemption that makes Silence a timeless heroine in the wake of the Puritanical strictures of Hingham village. What an achievement. I love this character and I love this book.” —Miah Jeffra, author of American Gospel
“Tracey’s writing is sumptuous and absorbing, transporting the reader to a provincial, eighteenth-century Puritan village while weaving together a deeply felt story that packs a considerable punch.” —Greg Houle, author of The Putnams of Salem: A Novel of Power and Betrayal During the Salem Witch Trials
“To grieve is a crime in Julia Park Tracey's lyrical novel Silence, unflinching in its depiction of the tyranny of religion and patriarchy and yet strikingly tender. Tracey
