My Rating ~ Five stars

5-gold-stars

RELEASE DATE: 6 March 2019

Publisher: Brass Anvil Books

Format: Paperback

Pages: 300

Blurb

Vanessa Brown is having nightmares: about babies. Ever since her husband, Pete, mentioned he wanted to start a family, Ness has been trying to convince herself she’s stoked to spawn despite her inability to keep a cactus alive—and a decade-old secret she doesn’t like to remember. So when she catches her slacker-cool coworker, Altan Young, stealing sleeping medication from the pharmaceutical company they both work for, she decides to try the pilfered pills to finally find some rest.

But side effects of Morpheum include headaches, nausea, and possible mind melding—a fact Ness and Altan stumble upon when they share the same freaky sex dream. (Awkward.) Now these two colleagues are joined at the brain by night, experiencing dozens of fantastic sleep-staged adventures courtesy of a little imagination and a whole lot of drugs.

With the stress of being caught between the men of her literal and figurative dreams (not to mention her nightmare of a boss), Ness starts to enjoy snoozing more than being conscious—and the company of her work husband more than her real one. If she doesn’t wake up and smell the coffee soon, her dreamy escape could become a dirt nap in this feisty debut novel about the dark side of dreams’ coming true.

Review

Thank you to the author for providing me with a copy of Sleeping Together in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved this book! It was funny, sad and mixed very real life issues (sexual assault and workplace harassment, addiction, marital issues, miscarriage, abortion and more) with the fantasy world of dreams. The author did a fantastic job of portraying the downward spiral, and consequent bad decisions, that come from addiction and that very relatable feeling of sometimes not being able to make a decision at all. The relationships in Sleeping Together are especially complicated – Ness finds herself in the position of her husband wanting to start a family, while she doesn’t. Part of her feelings stem from a traumatic event in her past, but I think the book did a good job of touching on the pressure women feel to have a baby, just due to societal norm. Altan is an outwardly cool and collected work colleague that Ness has a small crush on. While both using a drug their company is trialing, they discover they can meet in dreams. When the line between the dreamworld and the real world start to blur, and the dream world starts to have real world consequences, both Ness and Altan start to question the way they feel about everything.

Ness and Altan are both wonderfully flawed characters that I found myself loving and scolding all at the same time.

I didn’t want to put this book down, I absolutely loved it and was so excited when I got to the end and realised there will be a sequel!