The title should probably be Before I Never Get Any Sleep because you won't stop reading until you know
Thank you to Jean for the wonderful recommendation! Jean is a non-blogger friend and I try to read whatever he tells me to but I suck at actually reading them. I prioritized this because the movie would be out soon at the time I started this but it sucks because the movie wasn't shown here in the Philippines. Bummer. But I am still so glad Jean pushed this to me so much because THIS. BOOK.
Most of the blurbs of Before I Go To Sleep described it as a page turner. Was it a page turner? Absofuckinglutely. I am not kidding. The title should probably be Before I Never Get Any Sleep because you won't stop reading until you know. Know what, exactly? You see, the novel is centered on Christine, a forty-seven year-old woman who wakes up every day with her memories erased. A clean, fresh slate. Every time she goes to sleep, her brain lets go of the memories she formed that day. Bad enough as that is, she wakes up thinking she's still twenty-two and sometimes a child, panicking who she's in bed with, who's actually her husband. Tough life, I know. However, she started keeping a journal with a doctor's suggestion and she finds that her husband Ben isn't being completely honest with her. Why is he telling her another version of the past when her sudden flashbacks tell another? So, what exactly, is Ben hiding? Why is he lying? Can Christine trust her? Christine wants to know and I WANT TO KNOW, dammit.
It frustrated me even more because I read this during a week-long vacation and my family and I went to tons of places so I couldn't read as much as I wanted to. If you follow me on Instagram, you'd see that this book was in tons of pictures because I read it in a week. Do you know how hard it is to read a pageturner in twenty thousand sittings? IT WAS TORTURE. When I did finish it while waiting for the plane back home, I actually had goosebumps all over my arms.
Truth be told, I think I would have loved this even more (like, five stars and all the exclamation points) if I didn't know anything about it. My friend Jean told me that he might love this book even more than Gone Girl and that's a big thing to say because we love Gone Girl. Moreover, he told me that the twist was insane. So I knew that there was a twist or that the reveal would be shocking and so, the whole time I was reading the book, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was anticipating everything, so in the end, I wasn't as shocked as I might have been. Or maybe I just judged early, stuck by it, and ended up right. Oops, yeah, I just realized I might have ruined the whole experience for you guys too. I shouldn't have reviewed this!
Lastly, the resolution of the novel kind of felt flat and rushed and too convenient for me. The previous reason I stated for me not loving the book is because of me. But this is the only criticism I have for this book. Still, I had so much fun (and by fun I mean being glued to the page and getting excited, curious, and hypothesis-crazy) riding along with Christine's story. I highly recommend this to fans of mystery and suspense thrillers.
