Land of the Living

“When you know you’re dreaming you wake up. Sometimes you wake into another dream. But when you wake and nothing changes, that must be reality.”

Here we are in the Land of The Living, as Abbie calls it, the place where we are free to act as we please. We work, meet friends, we eat and drink and have fun without restrictions but the ones we set.

What if suddenly those simple things were snatched away from us? We find ourselves in a dark place and as much as we blink, the darkness won’t go away.

What would you do? How would you react if suddenly you were forced to leave The Land of the Living?

I was hooked with this book from the very first words: Darkness. Darkness for a long time.

I had the immediate need to learn who this person in the darkness is. How did she get there? Why is she there? But Abbie has no answers and no memory so I listen to her quite carefully as she describes the smells and the noises since she’s blindfolded. She builds images and forces herself to remember how it is to be free. 

A butterfly on a leaf.

Following a character while she’s in captivity was very interesting and Nicci French managed to make is so real and vivid. Abbie tries to remember, to realize and accept the state she finds herself into and finally she tries not to lose the scraps of herself she actually remembers.

The writing is fast and flows so nicely, pulling the reader into the story, into Abbie’s strange and unknown life. I was hooked throughout the book and since I don’t want to spoil it, I can’t say too much.

So I let the book speak:

“You know when I wake in the early hours, when everything seems grim and sad, what I sometimes think? I think that I’m on wheel, going round and round.”

“I closed my eyes and saw darkness, and it felt like the darkness of my lost time, folding me around again.”

“You get into things gradually and you don’t realize quite where you are until it’s a crisis and you suddenly see.”