It takes a lot to bring your voice into the limelight, especially when there are so many other voices clamouring for attention, but Alexandra Monir brings the voice of the Black Canary to the forefront of the DC Icons collection with Breaking Silence. Part scathing examination of how easy it is to fall into a dystopian world, part finding and fighting for your own voice, Breaking Silence is a great read to get you into the mood to break down the patriarchy.
Dinah Lance just wants to sing. But in a world where the voices of women everywhere have been silenced by the patriarchal Court of Owls, the one thing Dinah doesn’t feel she has is any say in what happens in her life. When a local resistance group strikes at the Court of Owls at the Patriarch’s Ball, Dinah finds she may have more power than she thought. And she intends to use it to right the wrongs that have been done to her and the women in her city.
Breaking Silence is one of those books that when I finished reading, I wanted to buy up pallets of the book and donate them to youth organisations around the world. It may not be perfect (because no book is actually perfect), but it has a strong message and I can guarantee it’ll light the fire for youth out there who want to fight for a better world.
It is easy to determine from reading Breaking Silence that Monir really wanted to write a Black Canary story and she wanted to do the character justice. Dinah Lance is portrayed as a strong teen with a power she is just coming into, but she is also shown to be very human. She has a growing attraction to the new boy in school, she misses her mother who passed away, and she wants to break free from the ridiculously restrictions put on women. The story is written from a very internal POV and we spend a lot of time in Dinah’s head, getting to know her. This felt like the right way to approach the story and bring another level to the sense of isolation of women in this dystopian world.
And while this story is rightfully Dinah’s, most of the other characters suffer from very little build up. That’s not to say they fall totally flat, but I wished for a little more depth. One of the better developed characters was Oliver Queen aka the Green Arrow. At first, I was worried that the inclusion of Oliver as the Green Arrow and the romantic interest for Dinah would take away from the point of the story. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Oliver didn’t detract from Dinah’s story at all. The romance and respect between these two was very sweet and it was nice to see an ultimately positive and realistic relationship blossom over the course of the story.
Is Breaking Silence a wildly original origin story that smashes the tropes seen often in YA? No, but that hardly makes it a disappointing read. The thing about superhero/vigilante stories is the inherent suspension of belief that comes with them. They are outlandish, exaggerated, rely heavily on tropes, and typically are escapism that also house a world of examination of social issues. In that respect, Breaking Silence is no different than the superhero stories that came before it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can’t put the superhero antics of male characters on a pedestal and then tear apart the same antics when it’s a woman in the mask.
Breaking Silence brings together some well-known tropes and gives us an engaging story to read. Monir has taken Black Canary and given her a modern origin story and purpose. If you are looking for a good read that has the depth and heart that makes superhero stories so enduring, pick up a copy of Black Canary: Breaking Silence.
Black Canary: Breaking Silence is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of December 29th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
THE HANDMAID’S TALE meets the DC universe in this breathtaking, thrilling origin story of Black Canary. Her voice is her weapon, and in a near future world where women have no rights, she won’t hesitate to use everything she has to fight back.
Dinah Lance was seven years old when she overheard the impossible: the sound of a girl singing. It was something she was never meant to hear—not in her lifetime, and not in Gotham City, taken over by the Court of Owls. The sinister organization rules Gotham as a patriarchal dictatorship, all the while spreading their influence like a virus across the globe.
Now seventeen, Dinah can’t forget that haunting sound, and she’s beginning to discover that her own voice is just as powerful. But singing is forbidden—a one-way stop to a certain death sentence. Can she balance her father’s desire to keep her safe, a blossoming romance with mysterious new student Oliver Queen, and her own desire to help other women and girls rise up and finally be heard? And will her voice be powerful enough to destroy the Court of Owls once and for all?
