Book Summary and Reviews of Sleep by Honor Jones

Book Summary

From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.

Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.

Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents' bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.

Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what's on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. In Honor Jones's debut novel, Sleep, a newly divorced young mother is forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters to visit the house where she grew up. How does Honor Jones show the events of Margaret's childhood reverberating and refracting through time when she becomes an adult and a mother? Where do you see Margaret's past directly informing the way she engages with the people around her, especially her family?
2. How are the choices that Margaret makes as an adult linked to her experiences as a child? Consider the decisions she makes in how she parents her children. How does she balance choice—the things she does because she wants to—and the obligations of adult and family ...