Are You Awake?

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One night, both Mary and Tim look out to a house across from them, and witness violence through the window.

The premise of this book drew me in, 2 neighbours who have never met, both with sleep deprivation think they have seen something suspicious in the window of a neighbouring apartment, they start meeting up and investigating the case of a local missing girl, who they are convinced they have seen in this apartment window and they need to save her. Mary has 2 young children who are never quiet and keep her up all night (and an unsupportive jerk of a husband to boot). Two strangers, very different people, are connected by efforts to save a young girl, creating unlikely allies. The two meet one day when they think they see a young woman in a house across the park doing erotic things in the upstairs bedroom.I didn't care about either of the sleepless characters, and honestly the new mom's husband made me want to literally throw things, because I've been in new mom tired land, and it sucks.

Without thinking, she deposits the children back to bed and barely stopping to grab a robe, Mary marches out the door and across the street to where the stranger is snooping. The following night both seek refuse in a nearby park and realise they were not dreaming about the attack. They see news reports of a missing woman who was last seen in this area and become convinced m the woman hey saw is her. When penning her first novel, McGowan was still in primary school, and she admits that the novel was not interesting at all. The story didn't really pick up until the end, and I can't really say if it was worth sticking it out.Tim was also a complex character; initially we feel a strong empathy for him, but this becomes more reluctant as his infertility and reckless selfishness is revealed later in the book.

The story is told from Tim and Mary's perspectives with occasional point of view from missing girl, Samantha. It will have you questioning your own credibility and leave you pondering the reliability of our two narrators. For someone who struggles to sleep, books with titles like Are you Awake will always jump out at me, this novel was a bit improbable, Mary a mother of two demanding children is awake when she sees what looks like a woman being attacked in a house that is run down and being renovated, she teams up with a neighbour who has his own demons and sleepless nights to discover the truth behind what they have both witnessed. There definitely were more intriguing plot lines in this story and they were all woven together so well.

I felt that both Tim and Mary would not act in the way that the story took them so I found it difficult to come to terms with this fact.