Before I Go To Sleep A review

Christine wakes in a strange bed, doesn’t recognize the room or the man snoring next to her. He has grey-flecked hair and she surmises she must have had a one-night stand with an older man. When she makes it down the corridor to the bathroom and looks in the mirror she has no recollection of ever seeing the middle-aged woman reflected back at hair.

In answer to her screams her husband Ben shows up and tells her, as he does every day, who she is and how she has amnesia. The photographs surrounding the bathroom mirror show her each day a history of her life so far, and as she relaxes into the day all is well. She just knows that as soon as she goes to sleep tonight it will all start over again.

After ben has left for his teaching job the phone rings and a Dr. Nash reminds her to look I the shoebox in her closet. Apparently she has a journal that she writes in every day that she keep hidden from her husband. The first note in the journal is DON’T TRUST BEN! As the novel progresses day by day and we get used to her routine Christine’s life unfolds to us and to her. Gradually her memory increases until she no longer needs a daily reminder of the hidden journal and as Dr. Nash takes her to places she lived and worked previously she begins to have flash backs of her prior life. When she confronts Ben as to why he never told her of the novel she published or the son she bore his answers are not glib, they make sense in order to protect her daily fragility.

When her flash backs are of a man in her bed with a beard and a scarred face – definitely not Ben - and memories of a brutal assault, not of the automobile accident she has been told caused her head injuries Christine begins to question Ben’s trust again and by the time she wakens in the very room she was assaulted in you can just hear the shrieking music of the sound track of her life. Nothing is as it appears and as the reader you should question everything you see and then never go to sleep again!