Book review: Before I go to Sleep

I read the description for S.J. Watson's "Before I go to Sleep" on the New York Times Bestseller List one evening and knew I had to recommend it to book club members.

I bought the book on Tuesday, started reading before I went to bed on Wednesday night, and finished this evening, Friday. I could not put the book down!

Imagine waking up and not knowing where you are. It's happened to all of us at one time or another. Perhaps in college when you thought you were still living at home; or perhaps when you moved into your first apartment or bought your first house... Thankfully for us, we soon realize where we are and continue on with our day, forgetting the awkwardness and disorientation we had upon waking.

Unfortunately this doesn't happen with Christine, the main character in "Before I go to Sleep." Christine wakes up every day not knowing where she is, who the man is next to her in bed, or who she is. She has no memory of the past; not even the prior day.

"... At first I can't work out what it is, but then I see it. The hand gripping the soap does not look like mine. Its skin is wrinkled, the nails unpolished and bitten to the quick and, like that of the man in the bed I have just left, the third finger wears a plain gold wedding finger. / I stare for a moment, then wriggle my fingers. The fingers of the hand holding the soap move also. I gasp, and the soap thuds into the sink. I look up at the mirror. / The face I see looking back at me is not my own. The hair has no volume and is cut much shorter than I wear it; the skin on the cheeks and under the chin sags; the lips are thin; the mouth turned down. I cry out, a wordless gasp that would turn into a shriek were I to let it, and then notice the eyes. The skin around them is lined, yes, but despite everything else, I can see that they are mine. The person in the mirror is me, but I am twenty years too old. Twenty-five. More." (pgs 4-5)

Every day Christine wakes up not knowing who or where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep. Her husband, Ben, is a stranger to her, and he explains their life together on a daily basis. As a result of a mysterious accident Christine is an amnesiac; a special case where not even new memories are stored in her mind. With the encouragement of her doctor, Christine starts a journal to help jog her memory every day. Of course, without a daily morning call from her doctor, she wouldn't know she had a journal.

One morning Christine opens the journal and sees that she's written three words: "Don't trust Ben."

As she writes in and reads her journal every day, she slowly pieces together her past, starts remembering more details, and begins to see inconsistencies in her memories and the things Ben tells her that happened. She doesn't know who she can trust. She doesn't even know if she can trust herself! The story will keep many readers guessing until the very end.

There aren't many books where time simply disappears for me, but this was definitely one of them! I highly recommend this book.