Before I Go to Sleep

When Christine wakes every morning she does not recognise the man beside her. Sometimes her last memories are of early childhood. Sometimes they are from her early twenties. As the result of an accident she is unable to hold onto new memories for more than a day. They are lost when she goes to sleep.

The story is told through a journal she has started to keep at the suggestion of her therapist, Dr Nash. Her meetings with him are kept secret from her husband, Ben, as her journal leads her to believe she does not trust him. Christine begins to suspect Ben is keeping things from her, as she struggles to piece together her past.

This is an extraordinary thriller. Watson uses the journal to tease out details and develop the characters while allowing you to question what is real and what may be a false memory. This suspense story is also not without heart. The themes look at the important role memory plays in our identity, and what happens when we forget the people we love. It also looks at how we change memories, and the ability we all have to mould them into what we want them to be.

I particularly enjoyed that Watson took his time to explore Christine’s pain and the absolute unfairness of her situation. While the pacing is good he does allow room for her to mourn the life she does not remember and also contemplate the point of her existence. Would you want to rebuild who you are every single day? She must also question herself, and decide which parts of her journal to trust.

The ending does not disappoint but it does feel rushed. There is a slump before the climax where you are begging for Christine to piece things together, and then it all comes rushing at you in the finale. Despite this, it is a fantastic debut novel and I couldn’t put it down.

4/5

Deep Secret

The blurb:

The Barnes family has lived in one tiny village for generations.

Twins Madeline and Grace, their cousin Elspeth, Colin and Oliver, old Aunt Susan – all there forever, in a place barely touched by time.

The twins have a secret. So does Aunt Susan.

Secrets are everywhere in this place.

But nothing is forever – people die, and even the most beautiful places have to change.

However deep the secret, you have to tell somebody sometime...

The story is set in a small village that lies at the bottom of a valley. They are a community lost in time. The men and women fill stereotypical roles and young people are expected to find love, marry, and settle down.

Twins Medline and Grace share an unbreakable bond. They are so alike even their mother occasionally mistakes one for the other. When tragedy strikes the town is beside itself with grief. This is compounded with news that the valley is to be flooded and turned into a reservoir. These two incidents shake the town to a point where its secrets start spilling out.

It’s not hard to see why Berlie Doherty has won the Carnegie Medal twice. Deep Secret is filled with sentences that could be straight from the lines of a poem. It’s a deeply moving book with characters that are rich and alive. You feel a sense of community, like you are a part of their town, and want to fight alongside them. The flooding of the village is taken from the true story of the creation of the Ladybower Reservoir. Doherty was fascinated by the  destruction of a town, and with it, the history of its inhabitants.

This is a hard book to review without giving anything away (there is a big ‘wow I didn’t see that coming moment’ quite early on), so I will just say that Doherty explores identity in a very interesting way. The story looks at the identity of individuals and of the village as a whole. Madeline and Grace are characters that you fall in love with and it’s fascinating to look inside the bond only twins can share.

My only criticism is that I think it went on a little too long. I didn’t mind the length of the actual book but more the time span. I felt I was starting to tire of the characters a little and felt the pace had slowed. I enjoyed the first two thirds the most. In saying that, this is really only a small criticism, and I love this book so much I finished it in two days.

4/5

The Help

 

The blurb:

“Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962.

Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver....

There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.

Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely on one another. Each is in search of a truth. And together they have and extraordinary story to tell...”

This novel has not been without its controversies. There have been a lot of discussions about the appropriateness of a white woman writing in the dialect of a black maid from the 60s, and how authentic that voice could ever be. I have to admit, it was the first thing that struck me about the book. I kept saying to my partner, ‘I don’t think it’s right. It just doesn’t feel right when I know this was written by a white person.’

The good news is; I soon got over this. The characters are so warm, rich, enjoyable and entertaining that you forget about the voice and become totally absorbed in the story. Skeeter is the woman I hope I would have been during the civil rights movement. She begins to look at her friends like an outsider and see people, not coloured people, when she speaks to the help. Aibileen is wise, funny, and has a big heart. She is still carrying the hurt from the loss of her son and throws her love towards the children she cares for. Minny is as tall as her mouth is big. She is known for her frankness and is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man she just can’t seem to stop having babies with.

One of the big successes of the book is that the characters are equally entertaining. We have all read multiple POV novels where we can’t wait to get back to a certain character. In The Help Kathryn Stockett has created characters that you are sad to leave, but are equally happy to return to the next.

The story is well paced, warm, and at times heartbreaking. I felt continually confronted by the thought that these events took place only 50 years ago. It is glaringly obvious that it’s written by a white person and that is ok. Because, really, that’s what it is: a white woman trying to understand what her own maid was thinking in a time when the ‘coloured’ help had different bathrooms in their employer’s homes. The only way Stockett could have delved deeper into the ugliness of the time would have been to drop the black characters perspective, because a more in-depth analysis with the existing point of views would never have been as authentic. Then we would have been left with the story a white woman’s feelings about racial segregation, and the book would not have been as enjoyable as it is without Aibileen and Minny.  

4/5