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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Guest Room comes a spine-tingling novel of lies, loss, and buried desire—the mesmerizing story of a wife and mother who vanishes from her bed late one night. When Annalee Ahlberg goes missing, her children fear the worst. Annalee is a sleepwalker whose affliction manifests in ways both bizarre and devastating. Once, she merely destroyed the hydrangeas in front of her Vermont home. More terrifying was the night her older daughter, Lianna, pulled her back from the precipice of the Gale River bridge. The morning of Annalee's disappearance, a search party combs the nearby woods. Annalee's husband, Warren, flies home from a business trip. Lianna is questioned by a young, hazel-eyed detective. And her little sister, Paige, takes to swimming the Gale to look for clues. When the police discover a small swatch of fabric, a nightshirt, ripped and hanging from a tree branch, it seems certain Annalee is dead, but Gavin Rikert, the hazel-eyed detective, continues to call, continues to stop by the Ahlbergs' Victorian home. As Lianna peels back the layers of mystery surrounding Annalee's disappearance, she finds herself drawn to Gavin, but she must ask herself: Why does the detective know so much about her mother? Why did Annalee leave her bed only when her father was away? And if she really died while sleepwalking, where was the body? Conjuring the strange and mysterious world of parasomnia, a place somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, The Sleepwalker is a masterful novel from one of our most treasured storytellers.
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04.5 stars
I often have a hard time writing my reviews since I’m so adamant about not giving spoilers. It’s doubly hard when it’s any sort of mystery or suspense. I like for the reader to come to their own conclusions as the story unfolds for them and not have any sort of influence from anything I say in my review. But I’m going to try my best here.
This is what I’d call a sleepy story. You slowly meander into the narrative, not quite sure where it’s taking you. Although this is about the disappearance of the main character’s mother, there isn’t any real urgency to the beginning. I don’t know that I’m explaining that properly, because of course the characters feel an urgency to finding their mom/wife. But the book is written in such a way that I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, yet I wanted to know more. Possibly because it was written in first person past tense, which took away the feeling of things needing to happen immediately.
As the story goes along, it gets more and more compelling. Don’t like slow moving stories? Hang in there. Once you get to the second part of the story you won’t want to put it down. You’ll have your own theories and thoughts on who, what, where, why, when. That’s the fun of this story. It helps lighten the seriousness of the subject matter. Make no mistake, this is a heavy subject.
There are a number of choices this author made that I wondered about when they first came up that ended up making this a fuller story. I’ll circle back around to my no spoilers mention above…I can’t say too much without ruining it for you. This one is worth the read.
See my full review at https://allingoodtimeblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/the-sleepwalker-book-club/
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