Readers may expect Nikki Barthelmess’s Quiet No More [North Star Editions, October 13, 2020], the sequel to The Quiet You Carry, to continue following the tumultuous life of a young woman dealing with the trauma she experiences following the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her father. While Quiet No More does follow the events after the young woman’s father is convicted of his crimes, it is much more than what typical young adult novels focusing on tough experiences tend to be. Quiet No More is much more a novel depicting the inner struggles one must go through in order to heal from their past.

Quiet No More continues the story of college freshman, Victoria Parker, as she tries to navigate her new life in Reno after her father is convicted of sexual abuse against children in her home of Silver Valley. In order to try to control her whirlwind of a life, Victoria decides to join SASAH---Students Against Sexual Assault and Harassment, a club that focuses on helping sexual assault survivors. Shortly after beginning her freshman year and navigating her place amongst the other students in SASAH, Victoria finds herself in the middle of even more problems than she had before. An aunt Victoria never knew she has suddenly walks into her life and causes several problems for her, a student in charge of funding SASAH blackmails her into keeping a deep dark secret private, and some friends even betray her.

There are many reasons why this is a novel both adult and young adult readers should pick up, one of them being the way Victoria’s progression and healing from her trauma is portrayed. At the beginning of the novel, it is clear that Victoria has not had enough time to come to terms with her trauma and to begin healing from it. One of the ways Victoria is able to heal from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own father is through the new friends she makes at SASAH. Even though some of these new friends end up having some conflicts with Victoria, the way she is able to connect with these new people on a different level is one of the ways she is able to change into a more confident and stronger woman by the book’s conclusion. Additionally, readers may find it comforting to know that there are other people in the world who have had to deal with many unfair circumstances. Another aspect of the novel that is enjoyable and readers could benefit from it is the way Barthelmess is able to portray the trauma recovery process. The recovery process is often described as somewhat of a “rollercoaster” and it definitely portrays this accurately through the conflicts Victoria finds within herself, her family, and her group of friends.

In addition to the different portrayals of recovery and struggle, the novel provides many different relationships between Victoria and the people around her. From betrayal to heartbreak, readers will be able to see and understand why Victoria feels the way she does about the trauma she faced in the previous novel. From beginning to end, readers are able to see Victoria’s transformation from a shell of a person into the woman she was always meant to become; a strong and resilient one.

While the majority of Quiet No More focuses on Victoria dealing with her trauma, there are several instances where her thought process leaves a lot to be desired. When it comes to the way Victoria reacts to difficulties that come into her life, it seems as if instead of trying to be strong she shuts down and blocks everyone out---including the reader. It would be helpful if readers were able to see Victoria actually sit with herself and work with her trauma more throughout the novel instead of at the conclusion. Then, readers would be able to connect to Victoria more and understand why she reacts to these situations the way she does, especially if they have not experienced trauma themselves.

This book is the sequel to The Quiet You Carry, and I felt that it was an excellent follow up. You can read this as a standalone, but you get a much deeper impact if you read them in order. I loved this book. It made you care about the characters and what they went through, as well as shows millions of people they aren't alone. Four stars!

This was a really hard read but completely worth it. It was so hard reading about how many people failed our main character - her family, her foster mother, her social worker, the police - It was just heartbreaking. This is a very authentic look at abuse and victim blaming and coming to terms with the abuse that you have suffered.

I was a bit conflicted on how to rate this book. Overall I did really enjoy this book, maybe enjoy isn't the right word but you know what I mean, and just like book one this one discussed a lot of important subjects and did so in a super impactful way. However, I just felt like this book had too many things going on. I know that all of the things happening in this book are realistic but having them all together in one book didn't work for me. I feel like all of the different things just didn't get enough individual page time and it was hard to really care for some parts of the book. God, this is hard to explain without spoiling anything. Anyway, for the rest I was just super frustrated with most side characters. Almost none of them gave our main character the time to fully explain and completely overreacted based on one sentence. They also just didn't put in much effort to try to understand her and overall just ended up abusing her feelings and experiences to further their own agenda (also not the exact correct word but idk how else to explain it spoiler free). Some of those characters did get called out but others weren't and I feel like they deserved to as well. I also thought it was weird that absolutely no one in Victoria's life brought up going to therapy until like 80% in this novel. It's not like therapy is taboo in her circles as literally everyone around her that went through similair experiences is going or has gone to therapy and had positive experiences with it yet absolutely none of them thought of mentioning it as an option for Victoria. It just made it seem to me like none of these people actually cared about her and her mental health as much as they claimed to do. So yeah, I absolutely loved the first book and I was a bit dissapointed with this one, however I would still recommend it as it discusses a lot of important topics.

Victoria is in college now, and continues to recover from the abuse her father put her through. Even though her father is in jail, the trauma he gave her still follows her. To add to the struggles, a woman claiming to be her aunt shows up and asks her to lie about what happened to her. Confusing times are ahead for Victoria, as she tries to decide how, or even if, she wants to share her story.

I like that this book explores what happens to abuse survivors when their abuser is put in jail and the emotional rollercoaster that comes with it. Reading this book was tough sometimes, given the subject, but just because something is tough to read about doesn't mean it isn't happening in real life.

The thing that was a little annoying to me was the fact that Victoria joined that club, but didn't seem to be receiving any professional help to cope with her trauma. Now I know that's realistic because some people don't want to talk about it, but seeing as she joined the club and talked about it, I felt like maybe she could've also gotten some professional help? It also seemed like her abuse was just a little too fresh in her memory for her to already have been part of that club. So even though I like that the author tried to show us that abuse and trauma doesn't end when the abuser goes to jail, she could've also tapped into seeing a therapist and working through your issues a little more.

The ending was STRONG, in my opinion, and a good way to end the series.

This book is making us aware of sensitive topics such as domestic and sexual abuse, foster care, and bullying. I think it would be a good book to give you an inner understanding to the people who experienced the following. However, it could be triggering to some so please read it with caution.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to TBR & Beyond Tours, Netgalley, and Flux for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

This book is a sequel to the novel THE QUIET YOU CARRY, and although you don’t necessarily need to read the first to understand the second, it would give you more of an insight of what led to the events of this novel. So just a thought, and I do think that you should end up reading it if you get a chance, and if you are okay dealing with the same themes that we deal with here.

In this novel, we are with Victoria again, dealing with the aftermath of what was revealed towards the end of the first novel. As it says what happened in the synopsis, it isn’t technically a spoiler but it could be a spoiler if you plan on reading the first book first. Anyway, that kind of emotional and physical trauma is having an effect on her, and due to those incidents, she was also put into foster care for six months. It was for the best since it was not safe for her to be at home, but being uprooted from everything that you know and having to live with people that you aren’t sure truly love you after what happened to you can be very traumatic and overwhelming to deal with.

Despite those negative things, we see Victoria trying her hardest to focus on the positives in her life now that she’s in college, where she is living on her own and working on positive relationships in her life. She also got involved with a abuse survivors activist group, so she has that support from others that have gone through similar traumas as her, but they are also working to change the system so this doesn’t happen to anyone else. It feels very admirable of her to join an activist group like this when most people could want to not be involved in anything that would remind them of what happened. So I thought that was really brave of her as well.

But of course, there is still drama that Victoria has to deal with, and someone who is claiming to be related to her is telling her to lie to the judges and jury about what her father did to her. How dare this person make Victoria lie about everything she went through solely to save the man that put her through it? It’s terrible, and I’m not even Victoria! So you could imagine how Victoria is feeling, and I feel like she is justified in questioning whether this woman is even who she says she is.

If you are able to read a novel that deals with sexual abuse from a parent, and the aftermath, then I suggest this book. I understand that the content of this book could be hard for some people, and I don’t fault you at all if you decide not to read it for that reason. But if you are able to, I recommend reading both novels to fully get the experience of what Victoria went through and how she was able to maintain her identity.

Trigger Warning: sexual abuse, PTSD, abuse, alcoholism.

Nikki did it again. Quiet No more is an excellent sequel to the quiet you carry. It's a heart wrenching book of one girls story and how she deals with being a survivor and now in book 2, doing it on her own as a new adult.

Have you ever had one of those books where you go through a wave of emotions? This was that book for me. The way Nikki writes is absolutely phenomenal. Shedding light on so many subjects that are considered taboo, foster care, sexual abise, healing, and so much more. This was an easy read, and by easy read I mean it was so good I clutched onto every read and lost myself in the pages. Not once skipping through to see how much longer until the next chapter.

This is a book where you most definitely need to read the first one to understand the backstory and history of this book.

If only something like this had been available when I was in High school. To show kids its okay to deal with your healing in different ways, what might work for others might not work for you, that you are a strong person, you are a Survivor and you are deserving of love!

Victoria’s story continues in Quiet No More. Her father is in jail and she is starting her college career, but the trauma she’s been through over the past year still follows her as she tries to move past it. Worse yet, her case isn’t over and she still has to decide what kind of victim impact statement she wants to submit against her father in court.

I enjoyed the previous book in this series, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about this book. How much more was there to Victoria’s story? She’s out of foster care (with her stepmother albeit) and attending a college that seems to have a healthy environment for her. Turns out, there was a lot more to her story.

I personally have thought a bit about what really happens to victims/survivors after their abuser is put in jail. I always wondered if they would be able to begin to heal as they still knew that they would have to face this person in court for them to receive justice. Also, would they receive justice, as many abusers don’t get long sentences? This book begins to tackle these issues one by one. Victoria has to deal with a long-lost family member taking her father’s side, and even her own qualms about putting the man who raised her for years in a situation in jail where he might be abused himself. She also has to face the truth about her father’s past, a past she didn’t even know existed. This part of the book spoke to me the most, as Victoria wrote and rewrote her Victim Impact Statement trying to figure out the truth behind her feelings.

The parts of Victoria at college gave me mixed feelings. I loved the idea of a club of people who had survived their own abuse trying to save other students in their college who may be currently dealing with abuse. They know firsthand what these people may be going through and what the signs of abuse are. They are also the same age as the other students, so the students may feel more comfortable opening up to them than opening up to the college’s administration about their experiences. Their motives seemed good, and their club seemed like it was there to help folks rather than to hurt folks.

Nevertheless, Victoria was definitely not in a headspace to be working with any type of club that focused on her abuse. She was still in the thick of the trauma and didn’t seem to be receiving any type of professional help for it. Some people in the club had been abused years ago, and were better equipped to help others after years of treatment. Victoria’s abuse was simply too fresh, and I think being in that club (especially because of some of the members) was too much for her to try to take on in her first year of college. Another thing that was too much for her to take on in her first year of college was trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with her high school boyfriend. She needed time to truly be able to heal, and it was obvious from the start that being in a relationship was not going to be a healthy route for her. I think the involvement of her in these two things gave this character more pain than she needed during this already difficult time. It was difficult reading about Victoria dealing with these things that felt rather unnecessary.

Despite those things, this book drew me in even more than the last one, and I ended up finishing it all in one night. I was happy that Connie didn’t make much of a reappearance, and I enjoyed reading about Victoria healing her relationship with her stepmother and Sarah. Victoria’s aunt was….a whole other story but I feel like she played an important part in the book that really couldn’t have been removed. It is important to recognize that sometimes family members will side with the abuser instead of the abused, making the whole situation more difficult than it has to be. These important messages made the book for me, outweighing the college and relationship incidents.

I would recommend this series to anyone looking for a NA novel that discusses trauma and its effects on someone’s life.


I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Vicotria Park is now a collage student. She is starting her new life after the assault she survived from her father and six months in foster care. She is ready to branch out into her new life, repair some old relationships, build new once, attend collage, join a club to help abuse survivors, everything is going to be great. Of course all of this is distributed when out of no where a woman shows up claiming to be Victoria's aunt and she wants Victoria to lie about what happened. The sentencing for her dad is coming soon, and Victoria is being pulled so many ways, her aunt and dad want her to lie, her friends want her to lie. But what does Victoria want?

Nikki Barthelmess does an amazing job yet again with continuing Victoria's story. When I first read The Quiet you Carry I didn't think there was much more you could do to make the story better. But I was proven wrong when I read this. I enjoyed being able to read about Victoria grow and become more than just a child who was victimized. She is on her own in this book and it was so much more to see her as a young adult in collage instead of a teen in high school.

Nikki Barthelmess does character development so well, you still get to see characters that you grew to love in the first book which was an amazing touch because I was really nervous we were going to miss out on those characters in this book. However so many were added into the cast of this novel. It was amazing to have a well rounded cast of characters that didn't always have the best intentions and things didn't always work out for the best. It added a truly realistic feel to the novel that a lot of young adult novels don't have, I appreciated that feeling a lot.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a hard hitting contemporary but do read her first book The Quiet You Carry First as it adds so much more for Victoria's story first!

Trigger Warnings: Talk of sexual and physical abuse (the physical abuse story is fairly graphic). Scenes in a prison. Bullying.


Thank you to TBR Tours for the opportunity to read and review this book all opinions and reviews are my own.

I really did loved this sequel novel. I really enjoyed that I tackled harder topics like the aftermath of abuse and its effects on your relationships and also just your life. I also like this book tackled the larger topic of the me too movement. It was sometimes hard to be in victoria head at points but I really liked how this book was set in college. I read so few YA Novels that have that setting. It was read that read quite fast. I liked the how it took victoria two books but she has created her own found family. I def like the insight to what happens to foster care kids during college. Such a great read.

QNM picks up after The Quiet You Carry, and now Victoria is in community college. She has an apartment and a great boyfriend and mending ties with her step mother. And things look fine, as she's a part of the sexual assault prevention club on campus, and organising a fundraiser. Everything's fine until her supposed estranged aunt drops out from nowhere.

Just like TQYC, QNM was hard-hitting and emotional. We see Victoria grow and yet have hey own set of doubts. The amount of complications that she still has and goes through, I think, makes the story very real. The fact that even after everything, those memories never leave you and you cannot help but second guess. That is what exactly happened with Victoria too. On one hand she was glad to have her father behind bars for what he did, but on the other hand she's conflicted too because he's her father after all. And as someone not in her position, we won't understand it, but I think it was very valid.

The dropping of aunt into the scene further ruffled the feathers. She's pleading Victoria to try and lessen her statement for her father's trial. And at one point, Victoria almost comes this close to doing it. The emotional blackmail that she is put in - by her aunt, by her friends - it was unsettling.

And then at times I was extremely mad at Victoria. I swear. The was she treated Kale was sad and bad - there wasn't a single point where she accepted the fact that it was she herself who was going around with a boy and having feelings for him and then blaming Kale for hanging out with his friends. I was so mad, goodness!! I was glad that they broke up and led happy lives apart, and that at least at the end, she didn't run into Trey's arms.

The whole story felt a little haphazardly put at times. There were few scenes that I felt were simply put without any ulterior motive.

Another thing I didn't like was how Victoria only blamed her friends for arranging the anti protest and never once acknowledged the fact that she might have been wrong in her decisions too. Both the parties were at fault - Victoria should've thought more before taking that decision and her friends shouldn't have announced her trauma to the crowd. Nothing was right in that situation. But yeah, I get it too.

The discussion around trauma and victim and survivors was really well done I feel. The idea that survivors have to share their stories for the greater good is nothing but a hoax, and no one should be compelled to put there traumatic experiences out for people to exploit and use. I liked that, how Victoria realised her stance at the end, how she grew through it all and found her ground. The last speech was lovely and strong and it was powerful!

Quiet no more was a difficult read, once again. The author puts us readers in a difficult situation, because Victoria is a complex character and her thought process is something that not everyone would like. But it is real and honest, and I liked it that way. Because no matter how much I wanted to dislike her, I also couldn't overlook the emotional blackmail that she had grown through over the years that has made her double guess.

It wasn't my favorite book, at times I felt detached from the story and felt like the same thing was repeating. But I also feel the book series is an important one to read and understand.

Thanks to the publishers for an e-copy. All views expressed are solely mine.

Quiet No More is a tough read. This Nikki Barthelmess book is full of abuse and the process of trying to heal from such abuse.

I have a love/hate relationship with this book.

I wanted to love it, but the way Victoria treats her boyfriend drove me crazy. I know she's in over her head with some serious personal issues, but he treated him like complete crap, and then has the nerve to get jealous when he's talking to someone else.

I just couldn't stand her behavior and stopped reading.

This is the second book in the Nikki Barthelmess series. This book is about Victoria Parker. She is trying to live a normal life in college after being sexually assaulted by her father and living in foster care for six months. She attends college, lives on her own, has a boyfriend and is part of a club at school. Victoria thinks she has a normal life but let's face it, its totally not. it's full of drama and emotions. Things are about to get ugly real fast for Victoria. Will she get things under control again?.

I didn't like this book, I didn't like any of the characters or the storyline. I feel like the book was full of high school drama. I was just expecting something a little more grown-up, I guess. It was a little everywhere. It could have been a little more serious with the story of Victoria's assault.I felt like the starting of the book was boring and long and it took a while to get better and a little more serious at the end. I feel like Victoria is a college student her character could have been a little more serious less high school feel for the first part. In the end, she was totally badass tho. I just think this book was for the younger crowd. I guess this book was just not for me.

I would like to say thank you to NetGalley and North Star Editions for giving me the chance to read and review this book.

Oh woW I’m so glad she did a follow up to this series!!! I absolutely love this storyline

5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to review this title.

This book is about Victoria's life in college after a sexual assault by her father. She has to learn to navigate life now that he is imprisoned, and figure out what to say in her victim statement. She balks at the word "victim" throughout much of the book. The book is mostly about how a sexual assault survivor can tell their story, remain true to themselves, and the path that they take on that journey.

This isn't a bad book. I just felt that it was a little too after school special. There were points where it didn't feel authentic. The characters didn't feel quite fleshed out enough, which is surprising in that this is a sequel. Something about it just felt flat.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I enjoyed this one. The author did a great job writing it and thinking out the story. It was nice that there was not some cliche idea that the effects of abuse just end once a trials over, so that is to be appreciated. Sometimes heavy topics are not portrayed well, and that is not the case in this book. Also, Victorias character development is to be admired.

I think the downside to this novel is the connection to the characters. I really did not care for many of them, so it was hard to care for what was happening.

Unfortunately I did not realize that this was a second part, and as I haven’t read the first part of the book, I was unable to give it the full feedback it deserves! I do wish to go back to this one once I’ve read the first one, but for now, I can say that I thought the character development was very strong and that I thought it was a very realistic story, yet very sad.

I really had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, although the subject matter was interesting, the writing style was not.

This book dragged and I knew I was in trouble from chapter 1 - never a promising sign for the rest of the book.

Too long winded on details and not enough depth for me.

Thank you for providing me a copy of this book.
Sorry I wasn't able to go on and finish this.
It just didn’t work for me.
I'll try again next time and leave a feedback.