Sleep Sister by Laura Elliot
SLEEP SISTER by Laura Elliot
OVERALL SCORE 3/5
PLOT 3/5
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT 4/5
ENDING 4/5
COVER ARTWORK 3/5
READING EXPERIENCE 3/5
Sleep Sister is a family saga set in Ireland that spans the 1980s to the present day. It is a complex tale that deals with many issues, particularly those ageless problems facing women past and present, but also contemporary issues that affect everyone, like social values, politics and the media.
As you can imagine, to take all of this on in a single book is quite a task, and at 390 pages in the paperback edition, it’s a bit longer than the average psychological suspense novel. It is, in fact, an extended version of one of her previous books, When the Bough Breaks. For me, it was a little too long and would have been much more effective had some of the descriptive passes of flower and fauna, etc., been left out, as they add little to the story, however nice they are. For this reason, it’s possibly aimed at older readers, as this is quite an old-fashioned technique when it comes to novel writing, and it gives the book a kind of timeless quality that hints at an earlier time. Indeed, I was surprised to find that the book starts off proper in the 1980s with a chapter subtitled “ANASKEAGH – THE EARLY YEARS", as the feel of the story was more in tune with a writer like Catherine Cookson with its folk dancing and Christmas dresses!
There is a great story at the heart of this book, but the prose style is a bit too plain for me and the description bogs down an already long and complex story with lots of characters to keep tabs on, as you would expect in a family saga. Whilst reading this, I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to the late, great Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, another family saga but more dynamically written and of comparable length, if not longer.
But having said that, I really did connect with the main characters, especially Beth Tyrell, for reasons that I cannot go into here without plot spoilers. And equally, you will absolutely loathe the villain of the piece, who is one of the creepiest and skin-crawlingly vile characters I’ve read in some time, and a great and horribly believable achievement. You really do grow to hate them more and more as the book goes on! It would have been easy to portray the male characters in this story as just one-dimensional and either selfish or just plain bad, but Elliot really gets under their skins and fleshes them out very convincingly, revealing the underlying psychological reasons for their behaviour.
Overall, Sleep Sister was enjoyable, if slightly too long, and would possibly appeal more to an older age group, as the prose style is quite old fashioned and the story is quite slow paced. But give it a chance and you will become emotionally involved with the characters’ plights and you will be willing them on to find the happiness, love and healing that they all so desperately crave.
