Book Review: Stay Awake | Megan Goldin #stayawake

I have locked in on Megan Goldin ever since I read her first book The Escape Room. Her books are just so engaging and always pack the twists and turns. I had been worried when I read what Stay Awake was about that amnesia books aren’t usually a favorite genre for me, but this one didn’t get monotonous or bog me down too much in the memory lapse phases. The pace is great and the characters are well-developed despite the memory problems (usually this is a point that is lacking in books that explore this). A fun thriller!

About the Book

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers―a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.

Two years ago, Liv was living with her best friend, dating a new man, and thriving as a successful writer for a trendy magazine. Now, she’s lost and disoriented in a New York City that looks nothing like what she remembers. Catching a glimpse of the local news, she’s horrified to see reports of a crime scene where the victim’s blood has been used to scrawl a message across a window, the same message that’s inked on her hands. What did she do last night? And why does she remember nothing from the past two years? Liv finds herself on the run for a crime she doesn’t remember committing as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life. But there’s someone who does know exactly what she did, and they’ll do anything to make her forget―permanently.

In the vein of SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep and Christopher Nolan’s cult classic Memento, Megan Goldin’s Stay Awake is an electrifying novel that plays with memory and murder.

Plot and structure

The story centers around Liz Reese and opens with her waking up in the backseat of a taxi with no idea where she is or where she is coming from. When Liz arrives at her apartment, she finds that someone else lives there now (and has for a while) and she is covered in writing with snippets of information largely reminding her to “stay awake” and a bloody knife in her pocket.

The story is tense and is much more captivating than I usually find amnesia thrillers. We move on quickly from realizing she doesn’t remember anything recently and discover her last memory is 2 years earlier and in summer when she was working at a magazine in an office building and living in New York City. In present time she is back in New York City, but nothing else seems to be the same. Shortly after her most recent awakening, she sees a news story about a man who was murdered and the same message from her hand is written on the window “stay awake”.

The rest of the book is Liv trying to not only stay awake, but piece together the fragment of her memory and understand if and how she might have been involved in the murder from the news. The book is structured alternating between chapters from Liv’s present life, where she is piecing together her memories and navigating a murder investigation, and her past timeline leading up to her last memory where she is working for the magazine, dating her boyfriend Marco, and living with her best friend and roommate Amy. There are also some third person chapters narrated from the perspective of the detectives in the current case.

Thoughts

The pacing is slower at the beginning while Liv is still understanding and learning about her memory issue and where she is. I didn’t find it slow though because I couldn’t wait to find out what she would learn from her prior residence, office, friends, etc. Liv is motivated to figure out what is going on, and this means the story moves much quicker than many amnesia thrillers. She doesn’t spend long resetting her memory, we quickly move into the forward timeline where we are starting to get more clues (and eventually answers).

It was easy to cheer for Liv because even though we aren’t sure what exactly happened and how she might be involved in the crimes she is clearly linked to, she felt innocent. The amnesia helps with this—even if she did end up doing something awful or witnessing something awful, it’s clear her brain has completely disassociated from it.

As the story progresses, the pace continues to speed up because we start learning more and more. I loved how some of the answers just led to a new question, because it meant we could have twists and turns along the way with new clues and theories emerging. It really felt like solving a jigsaw puzzle where some pieces connect and others don’t work until more comes into place. I was shocked by the ending (in a good way). I did see other reviewers say a few things felt a bit too neat with the ending (no spoilers), but I disagree. For me, thrillers feel satisfying when the conclusion ties up what you want. Can it be exciting to finish a thriller with a bomb drop and several more questions remaining? Of course! But it can also be satisfying to wrap up a story with most strings tucked into place. I felt like I wanted to leave the book knowing where the characters were, what had happened, and if they’d get the right outcome moving forwards and I got that.

Overall a thrilling read with a fun play on amnesia thrillers!