“Take a Peek” book reviews are short and (possibly) sweet, keeping the commentary brief and providing a little peek at what the book’s about and what I thought.

Synopsis:

(via Goodreads)

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.”

My Thoughts:

Chris Bohjalian is one of my favorite authors, and The Sleepwalker doesn’t disappoint. He can always be relied upon to deliver a read that’s compelling, hard to put down, and with the most unusual of premises. Here, it’s a mystery with a little-known and extreme form of sleepwalking at its core. Told through the character Lianna, Annalee’s 21-year-old daughter, The Sleepwalker takes us inside a seemingly ordinary and happy family to reveal the pain and conflicts wrought by Annalee’s affliction.

Lianna is an interesting point-of-view character, still on the cusp of adulthood in some ways, leaving behind her stoner approach to life when her father and sister need her most. She’s both her mother’s daughter and her own person, challenging the facts and the investigation to uncover the truth behind Annalee’s disappearance, even when she realizes that the truth may be much more painful than she’s prepared to handle.

The Sleepwalker is a domestic story with a narrower focus than some of the author’s more recent books. It doesn’t have the weightiness and overwhelming horror of last year’s The Guest Room, with its focus on sex trafficking, or the historical sweep of earlier novels such as The Sandcastle Girls or The Light in the Ruins. Still, this story of a family’s suffering is absorbing and tightly constructed, and while I tried to figure out its riddles, I found myself barking up the completely wrong tree. I won’t say more, but wow — what an ending!

Bohjalian’s books always leave a mark. The emotional impact just doesn’t let up. You really can’t go wrong with any of his books (no, I haven’t read them all, but I’m working on it!), and if you enjoy contemporary mysteries and family dramas, definitely check out The Sleepwalker.

Note: A prequel story, The Premonition, is available as an e-book download. The Premotion recounts events from four years prior to The Sleepwalker. I recommend reading The Premonition first. It doesn’t spoil anything in the main novel and gives a good introduction to the characters and setting. If you prefer not to , though, you’re fine. The Sleepwalker stands perfectly well on its own.

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The details:

Title: The Sleepwalker
Author: Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Publication date: January 10, 2017
Length: 304 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: I received a review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley… and then I won a hard copy of the book in a giveaway from Reading With Robin!

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