Arden Maynor was only six when she went missing while sleepwalking during a huge rainstorm. She was found three days later, miraculously alive in a storm drain. The media went wild about it (think: the Baby Jessica rescue back in the early ‘90s) and Arden and her mother ended up on the talk show circuit, receiving loads of donations, her mother even wrote a book. Arden, on the other hand, can’t really remember anything about that horrific incident.
20 years later, Arden’s changed her name to Olivia, and has abandoned her old life altogether. She’s trying to live a normal life in privacy. She has a house in a small town, she’s working in medical administration, and takes care to keep her history completely secret from everyone she knows. All is fine and well until she discovers herself sleepwalking again one night— something she hasn’t done since the accident. It rattles her, especially after another night of sleepwalking, she finds herself standing over a body in her backyard, hands covered in blood.
This book was a slow burn: in both good and bad ways. The opening dragged some, but picked up quickly once Olivia woke up to the body, unsurprisingly. The development through the middle of the novel kept me guessing, and added in layers of complexity, compounding the feelings of confusion around what the truth could really be. There were threads of secondary characters that I would have loved to have fleshed out a bit more, but overall this was a great exploration of the roles we play in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, as well as what the after-effects of a traumatic event can be like.
Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. Pick up your copy here.
20 years later, Arden’s changed her name to Olivia, and has abandoned her old life altogether. She’s trying to live a normal life in privacy. She has a house in a small town, she’s working in medical administration, and takes care to keep her history completely secret from everyone she knows. All is fine and well until she discovers herself sleepwalking again one night— something she hasn’t done since the accident. It rattles her, especially after another night of sleepwalking, she finds herself standing over a body in her backyard, hands covered in blood.
This book was a slow burn: in both good and bad ways. The opening dragged some, but picked up quickly once Olivia woke up to the body, unsurprisingly. The development through the middle of the novel kept me guessing, and added in layers of complexity, compounding the feelings of confusion around what the truth could really be. There were threads of secondary characters that I would have loved to have fleshed out a bit more, but overall this was a great exploration of the roles we play in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, as well as what the after-effects of a traumatic event can be like.
Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. Pick up your copy here.
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