Thriller - S.J. Watson - Before I Go To Sleep (2011)

This one I borrowed from my friend Nadia, along with a few others. To paraphrase her selling of it to me, it's basically a thriller version of the movie Fifty First Dates.

If you've never seen that particular Adam Sandler movie, allow me to elaborate further. The main character of this book has a mental condition that does not allow her to transfer the day's short-term memories into long-term memory. As a result, every day she wakes up not knowing what happened the day before, or even in the years since she developed this condition, or (since memory is a tricky thing) who she is.

Upon sneaking to see a doctor about her condition years after it has developed, she has begun writing a journal about her day, including things that she has found out about herself and her long-suffering husband. But things are starting to come back to her, and they are not fitting up with what her husband is telling her. So she is beginning to wonder what else he is lying about, especially since he seems to be the only source of information for her.

I have a few problems with this book, but unfortunately time has given me an opportunity to become kinder towards it.

First off, this book is touted as a debut novel, and it shows; the dialogue-based explanation in the prologue and the Bond-villain style speech by the Big Bad at the end is amateur hour through and through. Even the assurances constantly of when the main character is writing in her journal are unnecessary; we get she's hiding it from her husband. You don't have to keep fucking telling us what she's doing to hide it from him.

The reviews coating the cover put its fast pace on a pedestal, and honestly it's because it's the only thing it really has going for it. The pages really do flip quick, but the coincidences required for this story to work out really challenge a reader's ability to suspend disbelief. It feels written, and everyone knows that writing that feels like writing is garbage sauce. It needed a few more rewrites before it went out to public eyes, but it didn't get that. So we have a lacking novel with a fast pace that is good only because it's stay will not be long.

Sorry, Nadia.

5.0/10

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