What makes one family tick, while another simply implodes? Elizabeth Flock attempts to answers these questions in her well-written book, Sleepwalking in Daylight. Juggling several dynamics at once, from the lack of marital communication to the issues of adopted children feeling alienated, Elizabeth explores the lives of the Friedman family in a dramatically tight and readable novel.
The book provides two perspectives simultaneously, that of the mother and the daughter. The mother, Samantha Friedman thinks she may be falling out of love with her husband and he is bored with her. Trying to figure out a teenage daughter who has gone goth, two twin boys, and the flirtations of a handsome man she meets, Samantha is worried, and with good reason, that she will be unable to cope with it all.
The daughter, Cammy, provides the second viewpoint of the family. Cammy searches for her birth mother without her parents' knowledge but will she have the emotional skills to deal with the feelings of being rejected by the woman who kept her for two years before placing her up for adoption. Cammy is looking for answers, but is spiralling into a world that is threatening to overwhelm her.
