Set in the fall of 2000 this novel tells the tale of the disappearance of Annalee Ahlberg who one night just got up and walked away. The thing is she was a sleepwalker but only when her husband wasn't in bed with her. She had sought help at a sleep clinic and believed her sleepwalking to be under control with medication so her husband felt safe after four years to go on a conference trip for a job as an English professor at a local college in near where the small town in which they lived in Vermont.
The search party finds a piece of her nightgown on a branch on the road going toward the river. Once twenty-one-year-old Lianna, the narrator of this book, got her mother down from the top of the bridge when she had sleepwalked naked. She also stopped her from turning the entire azalea bush from being spray painted completely silver in front of the house. But that night she didn't hear her mother get up and go sleepwalking and she's feeling the guilt.
The state trooper detective working the case, Gavin Rikert knew her mother because he too sleepwalks and the two met at the sleep clinic. She finds out about sleep sex in which the sleeper wants sex in their sleep and will sleepwalk to look for it. Gavin insists that they were merely a support group for each other and that nothing happened between the two of them, but Lianna wonders. Meanwhile, Gavin is asking her out on dates and she is accepting.
Back at home, Lianna's dad drinks himself to sleep and her twelve-year-old sister Paige who at first was out searching for clues when her mother went missing is now changing into someone who is bitter and hardened and not caring about anything. Except perhaps what happened to their mother which is still a mystery. Did she really sleepwalk into the river? If so where is the body? Or did she leave her family? Or did something more sinister happen? Throughout the book are a page written for each chapter that is like a diary supposedly written by Annalee that deals with how she felt about her sleepwalking and sleep sex.
This book meanders like it's in a fog which I realize that the main character Lianna is in as her grief over her mother that she can't quite express because the reality of it isn't there without a body. But that doesn't make for good reading. It tries to build up suspense but fails to do so. There is a twist at the end that I didn't see coming and I appreciated the creativity of it. Overall this is just an okay book. It's short so it has that going for it. I give it three and a half stars out of five.
Quotes
Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalker-Novel-Chris-Bohjalian-ebook/dp/B01FPGY5TK/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=1NF4IWPCI7DL8&keywords=the+sleepwalker+bohjalian&qid=1550502337&s=gateway&sprefix=the+sleepwalker%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-1-fkmrnullPeople survive by being callous, not kind, he sometimes told his students, not trying to be dismissive of the species, but realistic. How, he lectured, could we ever face the morning if we did not grow inured to the monstrosities tha marked the world daily: tsunamis and plane crashes and terrorism and war?-Chris Bohjamlian (The Sleepwalker p 10)Sometimes I’m not sure which hits us harder that relief when we wake up from a nighmare and realize it was just a dream, or the sadness when we wake up from a good dream—a really good dream—and realize that nothing was real.-Chris Bohjamlian (The Sleepwalker p 46)
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