The Execution of Noa P. Singleton

A Novel

By: Elizabeth L. Silver

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Amanda Carlin

An unforgettable and unpredictable debut novel of guilt, punishment, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive

Noa P. Singleton never spoke a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ended with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later, having accepted her fate, she sits on death row in a maximum-security penitentiary, just six months away from her execution date.
Seemingly out of the blue, she is visited by Marlene Dixon, a high-powered Philadelphia attorney who is also the mother of the woman Noa was imprisoned for killing. Marlene tells Noa that she has changed her mind about the death penalty and Noa’s sentence, and will do everything in her considerable power to convince the governor to commute the sentence to life in prison, in return for the one thing Noa is unwilling to trade: her story.
Marlene desperately wants Noa to reveal the events that led to her daughter’s death – events that Noa has never shared with a soul. With death looming, Marlene believes that Noa may finally give her the answers she needs, though Noa is far from convinced that Marlene deserves the salvation she alone can deliver. Inextricably linked by murder but with very different goals, Noa and Marlene wrestle with the sentences life itself can impose while they confront the best and worst of what makes us human in this haunting tale of love, anguish, and deception.

Please Highlight Nancy Grace's Review, OK?

One of the best written books I have listened to lately. Well thought out plot with lots of unique ways to look at the hard topic of the death penalty all in a captivating and clever fiction.


Noa is the very cynical main protagonist. If I have one complaint about this book that it’s a downer. Not a single upbeat in the entire book. I don’t know how you would write a death row novel that wouldn’t be. Noa has been sitting on death row ten years when the story opens. The remainder of the book gets the author up to date on Noa’s history and moves on to where she goes from here. Wow. The reader gets the back story before the trial. The trial of Noa is so resilient of the some recent death trials involving female lovers and mothers, but from all angles. For all the information that I thought was important to the case was not revealed in the light I thought would give be the best conclusion.

The story allows the reader to make their own conclusion though it’s extremely thought provoking. I will be thinking about this book for a long time and listening more dubiously to those television trials.

"Like Silent Thunder" and other bad metaphors

After the first couple of chapters, I really wasn't sure I was going to be able to hang with Noa P. - the book seemed completely overwrought and bogged down with lavish descriptions of irrelevancies. These roadblocks to the progression of the story quickly became irritating. It slowed the conversations between the characters, as Silver took time to describe the sensation of every breath, precise descriptions of the appearance of one character's fingers pressed against a pane of glass, and other minutiae. It's tedious.

Despite the morass of words, the story picks up and becomes compelling at the halfway point. I genuinely wanted to know what happened - there is a strong story here, but it's hard to see it under all the linguistic frippery. I wondered if perhaps the excessive descriptive language was deliberate on the part of the author, to make us feel as trapped, helpless and hampered as Noa does; but even if this is the case, it was still annoying.

One huge pet peeve: at one point, bullets go tumbling into a backpack "like silent thunder." What is silent thunder like? Wouldn't it be like nothing? If something is silent, isn't is basically not at all like thunder?

ANYWAY. I still liked the book. Once the action gets going, the language gets terser and better. I found the ending unsatisfying, but only because I had come to care about the outcome. Worth a listen.

Kept me guessing until the last page

Death row is a sad and lonely place. In the face of death, one always wonders what really happened,and is the truth enough to justify the taking of a life. This books tackles these ideas without judgment or pontification. It is a gripping page turner with characters you love (some in spite of yourself). The narraters are perfect, and I can't reccomend this book highly enough. It is a perfectly paced story that I would read again (a rarity). I want more by this author.

Are We Speaking the Same Language?

If books were free and there was no budget juggling necessary to pay for my addiction, I wouldn't care that a book was arbitrarily heralded and rolled out on a red carpet; I'd chalk a stinker up to an unlucky gamble--pick another from the book tree, and read on. Or, if *professional* critics reviewed books with no thought to marketing, I'd gladly accept my bad taste in literature and go on confidently to the beat of my own drum. Ah, if dishes were wishes... I wouldn't feel so hoodwinked (and light in the pockets); I wouldn't aim my discontent at those well-marketed wastes of trees. But gosh darn it I have spent a lot of $$ lately on books that are more wiener than winner. Therefore, I saw this author's own words, in the first chapter of this book, as encouragement: *once something has been said, it's impossible to ignore or forget what you heard* -- and I heard this book was supposed to be *genius*.

The Execution of blahblahblahblahton would be an outstanding paper for a literature class, or a passable rough framework for a novel, but served up as an amazing debut novel from a promising new author, one of June's top picks...it's a few trumpets short of a fanfare. I don't want to detract from the author's talent, or suggest its arrival should have been heralded by kazoos; she writes with intelligence, uses a considerable vocabulary well, and the book has a forceful pace that never drags. Some of the dialogue is very clever and provocative; she definitely has style, and deserves to be tagged as promising. I believe Elizabeth Silver will be an author to watch for, once she develops a little patina. The story itself is a flat plane, without dimension or plausibility; it suffers from an ambiguous theme and lack of direction or character development. Silver may have had a good premise, she just didn't flesh it out or give the reader the infrastructure for independent interpretation. It seemed inflexible and formulaic. Using the mother's letters to her dead daughter was expository dialogue that made the story feel even more contrived, and rigid. Instead of steering the reader to form those profound moral questions, she forces the reader instep and stuffs a pre-set opinion down the throat.

No reader agrees 100% all the time with all the critics; but lately I've been wondering if I'm speaking the same language as some of those paid to give their opinion. You may find this book very good--I'd agree with that assessment, but genius, mesmerizing, gripping, outstanding, consuming, unforgettable? That's why I ignored the 24 hr. rule and wrote this review immediately...ask me tomorrow and I won't remember this one, but I will remember Elizabeth Silver.

I really wanted to like it

It took me two separate tries to get through this book. It started out strong and I was craving to know more about Noa and Sarah, and even Marlene. But it petered out quickly and I struggled with motivation to pick it up again day after day. I eventually needed to return it to the library. I tried again a few months later and tried so hard to get into it. I was invested in the story, I cared about what happened, but I just couldn’t connect with any of the characters and I could read about 10 minutes before getting bored. I finally downloaded it on Audible to crawl through the second half while I did my daily walking. It wasn’t much better. The reader seemed almost bored most of the time, with all of the wrong inflection and none of the punch. There were times when someone in the book was clearly yelling, trying to get get through to the person they were talking to and the reader presented them as quiet and reflective. It was all wrong. In the end, I wanted Marlene to know what her role in her daughter’s death was and it really bothered me that she never would. I hated every single character in this book and thought it was all just so much about miscommunication and the immature beliefs of a young woman who never had anyone to talk to about life and consequences.