Book Review - Before I go to sleep

Before I go to Sleep- by SJ Watson

 

Review by Jacqui Slaney

As you can probably tell from the reviews I have done, my main reading does revolve around fantasy.  I do try to read other genres though, for example, a friend got me on to John Connolly who I now really like, so when I saw this book and read the reviews and the description, I thought it sounded intriguing:

Memories define us.
So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?
Your names, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight.
And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story.
Welcome to Christine's life.

As you can see the idea sounds interesting; you can imagine what this would be like, waking up everyday to not knowing who you are, or where you are and having to trust completely what you are told. You can imagine the confusion and the hopelessness of what your life would be.

This is exactly what the character Christine goes through every day. Every morning she awakes to find that she has lost all memories of the day before. Therefore, she has to go through a routine of rediscovering herself. She finds that she is older than she expects to be, and the man that she finds in bed with informs her that he is her husband and that she has been like this since an accident.  She starts to keep a journal of her day following the advice of a new doctor, which starts to help her, but when she starts to get flashes of old memories, that is when she starts to find things out about her life.

The story is a thriller and there is suspense. You will see reviews where the reader was kept gasping all the way through, that the suspense was brilliant and they could not work out the plot, and others who really disliked it.
This is a debut novel and it is quite a good one (I know, you can all hear the ‘but’ coming along), but, I must admit I worked out the ending from quite early in the book, and worked out why all this was happening, and that is someone who has not read that many thrillers!   I thought the writing was predictable and repetitive and so there was little suspense for me. A reader in my opinion had to read too many times about Christine’s start to the day and her rediscovery of things, and too be honest I did keep thinking that some of the plot was far fetched and that other people would be there, helping Christine and not just have left her to her condition.

Although all the hype on this book says it is brilliant etc, I am afraid that I will be one of the few voices not enthusiastic about it, the idea was excellent, but think it could have been dealt with in a much better way.

5 out of 10