The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian
Published by Penguin Random House ISBN 9780385538916
Hardcover, $26.95, 304 pages

Chris Bohjalian chooses fascinating topics for his novels, and then pulls the reader into these worlds that one gets lost in for a few hours. His 2012 novel, The Sandcastle Girls,  about the 1915 Armenian genocide in Syria, a story that sadly resonates too much today, is a novel I frequently recommend to shoppers at the Book Cellar where I volunteer.

A Light In The Ruins takes us to Italy during WWII, with a family caught up in the crosshairs of war.  His novels set in contemporary times, like the brilliant The Double Bind, which deals with a young woman violently attacked on bike ride, and The Guest Room, about a bachelor party host who gets involved with a young woman forced into sexual slavery, have twists that leave you gasping.

Bohjalian's newest novel, The Sleepwalker, takes on a topic not frequently dealt with in fiction. A woman prone to sleepwalking disappears from her home while her husband is out of town. Her two daughters, college-aged Lianna and 12-year-old swimmer Paige, were home that evening and heard nothing.

As searchers look for Annalee Ahlberg's body in the nearby river, we slowly find out more about her life. She only sleepwalks when her husband is out-of-town, but why that is remains a mystery. The girls, particularly Lianna, feel guilty about what happened.

The Ahlberg family is falling apart. Dad Warren retreats into his job as a professor at the local college and drinks himself into oblivion at night. Lianna takes a leave of absence from college, smokes weed all day, and gets side jobs as a magician while caring for her sister Paige.

One of the police officers on the investigation becomes involved with Lianna. She discovers that he and her mother met at a clinic that deals with sleep disorders and they became a kind of two-person support group. But was that all they were to each other?

The Sleepwalker has a very eerie quality to it, and as Bohjalian slowly unwinds more information about Annalee's disorder and her relationship with her husband and the cop, an uneasy feeling overcomes the reader.

There is a shocking twist at the end, but upon reflection, Bohjalian gives a few clues that could be picked up on by a careful reader. The Sleepwalker would make a fabulous movie, as it has a very cinematic element to it. The characters are intriguing, the story moves briskly, and watching this family fall apart is heartbreaking.

I highly recommend The Sleepwalker, both for fans of mysteries and of family stories. If you read Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, you'll want to put The Sleepwalker on your list.


Chris Bohjalian's website is here.

Weekend Cooking: An excerpt from The Sandcastle Girls

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food!

I've read and enjoyed several of Chris Bohjalian's novels, including Midwives, The Double Bind, and Secrets of Eden.  His books are thought provoking, with characters who are three-dimensional and complicated, and I get lost in the worlds he creates.

While reading his latest novel, The Sandcastle Girls, which I think may be his best one yet, I came across an excerpt that fits beautifully within the Weekend Cooking meme. Laura Petrosian is a novelist, whose grandfather is Armenian, and here she describes making a cheese boreg, a puff pastry filled with cheeses.

"Among the strangest, most unexpected elements deep within my DNA is the reality that I am able to work seamlessly with phyllo dough. In all other ways I am an unbelievably bad cook and my kitchen is a very scary place. I am just like my mother in that regard. I cannot bake a cake unless it comes from a mix, I have never roasted a turkey that did not wind up dry as a bloated vacuum bag, and my rice is either soggy or burned. The inside bottoms of a lot of my pots and pans have been scorched black.

And yet I am capable of producing savory cheese triangles that are flaky on the outside, moist on the inside, and aesthetically perfect- each an obtuse isosceles with crisp edges and sharp points. The Armenian name for the cheese triangle is boreg, and it was my aunt- my father's much younger sister- who taught me to make them. What makes their preparation such a culinary tightrope has nothing to do with the filling; that's easy. In the recipe my aunt shared with me, it was simply feta cheese, parsley, diced scallions, eggs and black pepper. What makes the boreg such a feat is the necessity of working with phyllo dough, each sheet as thin as a tissue. Phyllo is the Greek word for "leaf", and the sheets dry out and become brittle- and, thus, completely useless- moments after being exposed to the air. Phyllo can be demanding for even a seasoned baker. And so, in theory, working with the stuff should be a nightmare for a hook-handed chef like me, and the kitchen should become a Hades-like inferno of frustration. But it's not. I seem to be able to thaw phyllo, fill it, and fold it. I seem to know precisely how much browned butter to paint on each sheet."

Here is a link to a recipe from the website Armenian Food. 

The Sandcastle Girls tells two stories, one set in Syria in 1915, during the genocide of Armenians. Young Elizabeth Endicott has traveled with her father and the Friends of Armenia from Boston to bring food and medicine to the refugees. She is horrified by what she sees and what the world does not know about, the extermination of an entire people. She falls in love with Armen, an Armenian engineer who has lost his wife and young daughter to the slaughter. Along with the American consul, Elizabeth tries to save whom she can and help tell the true story of what is happening.

In 2012, Elizabeth's granddaughter, Laura, is trying to find out about her Armenian heritage when a friend tells her that she has seen a photograph of Laura's grandmother in a museum exhibit. Laura goes there and discovers a secret that colors her family's life.

It's an incredibly emotional and moving novel, and one that I could not put down. My review will be posted soon.