{"id":685,"date":"2012-08-29T22:26:01","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T04:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=685"},"modified":"2012-08-29T22:26:39","modified_gmt":"2012-08-30T04:26:39","slug":"before-i-go-to-sleep-s-j-watson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/before-i-go-to-sleep-s-j-watson\/","title":{"rendered":"S.J. Watson: Before I Go to Sleep"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This was a book club selection, and it\u2019s one of the few I can remember where I had advance e-mails from delighted club members saying how much they loved this book.\u00a0 One woman even came in and bought another copy to give to a friend.\u00a0 When I finally got to reading this book \u2013 a multiple award nominee this year in the U.S., and last year in the U.K. \u2013 I found out how intelligent my book club members really are.\u00a0 I loved it too, and like them, I couldn\u2019t put it down.\u00a0 I was making a drive home and had to pull into a rest stop to finish reading it.\u00a0 The last book that required such a drastic measure was Michael Connelly\u2019s The Poet.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The premise of this novel is both simple and complex.\u00a0 The main character, Christine, suffers from amnesia.\u00a0 Each morning she wakes up, unaware of what she\u2019d been able to remember the day before, unsure who the strange man sleeping beside her might be.\u00a0 He\u2019s her husband.\u00a0 She looks in the mirror, and is astonished at the older woman looking back at her. It\u2019s an older version of her \u201cremembered\u201d self, of course. Each day, her life must be re-explained to her, and each night she falls asleep and forgets everything all over again.<\/p>\n

That could be a monotonously horrible story line if somehow Watson wasn\u2019t such a terrific story teller.\u00a0 Each day manages to be somehow different from the one before it \u2013 for the reader, in any case.\u00a0 Sometimes Christine will remember something and then find that her husband, Ben, has told her whatever it was many times before.\u00a0 What Watson cleverly adds is a journal that Christine is keeping at the suggestion of her doctor, Dr. Nash, who is working with her unbeknownst to her husband.\u00a0 Each morning Dr. Nash calls her and reminds her where the journal is and that she\u2019s been keeping one, and each morning she reads it and remembers all over again what she\u2019s written the day before.<\/p>\n

It transpires that Christine has lost her memory in some kind of horrific accident, one she has absolutely no memory of, and the length of her amnesia \u2013 almost 20 years \u2013 is staggering. \u00a0Memories make a life, and in a very real sense, she has none.\u00a0 This book takes all kinds of twist to get to its end point, an ending so shocking and surprising (and yet so meticulously set up by the author) that you\u2019ll be smacking yourself on the forehead for not figuring it out sooner.<\/p>\n

The pure narrative pleasure of this novel cannot be overstated, but Watson also has a lovely writing style and a wonderful hand with characters.\u00a0 You\u2019ll grow very invested in Christine and what happens to her, as well as the small cast of characters surrounding her. \u00a0When you finish it you may wish for a brief moment that you had Christine\u2019s problem, that you could forget the story and read this wonderful book all over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a book club selection, and it\u2019s one of the few I can remember where I had advance e-mails from delighted club members saying how much they loved this book.\u00a0 One woman even came in and bought another copy to give to a friend.\u00a0 When I finally got to reading this book \u2013 a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14,13],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-psychological","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}