Book Review: Sleep, by Honor Jones

I came to Sleep with high expectations. A favorable review in The Washington Post, a New York setting, a character-driven family drama.  Sounds good, no? And yet, by the time I finished it, I was left totally unmoved.

The premise is heavy but handled with restraint. Margaret, the protagonist, was molested by her brother as a child, and her mother largely minimized or ignored it. The novel is not graphic or exploitative, and Jones deserves credit for that. This is not trauma porn. As a newly divorced adult raising a daughter who’s nearing the age Margaret was when the abuse occurred, she begins to reexamine her past, her family, and her own fears as a mother. The book is clearly interested in how old wounds quietly persist and fester, and in theory, this should be powerful. In practice, it just comes out… blah.

Margaret’s mother, Elizabeth, is the most fully realized character in the book: cold, snotty, self-absorbed. Most of the cast, however, feels thinly sketched. The brother remains a cipher. In some instances, he’s mentioned in the book, and I had to stop for a second to remember who he was.  Other family members drift in and out without leaving much of an impression. Margaret herself is rendered with great complexity. Perhaps too much, honestly. We spend pages inside her thoughts as she worries, revisits, anticipates, and hesitates. She thinks, but rarely acts. Scenes blur together. Nothing truly lands. I just wanted something to actually happen.

The novel’s biggest weakness is its refusal to coalesce. It hits on many themes — sexual trauma, motherhood, divorce, mental health, familial dysfunction, midlife reassessment — but never quite commits to any of them.

I found myself wanting more action from Margaret, more confrontation, more risk. I understand that people heal from trauma at their own pace, but the book traps the reader in the same static life she inhabits. Realistic, maybe. Compelling? Not really.

Sleep is readable, often well written, and emotionally sincere. But for a novel about a strong defining event, it feels strangely uneventful. When it ended, I didn’t feel devastated or enlightened, just mildly fatigued. In the crowded field of novels about family dysfunction and buried trauma, this one simply doesn’t rise to the top.