Last year I read Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists (Overdrive Ebook/Audiobook) and absolutely loved it, so when I came across her debut novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (Overdrive Ebook/Audiobook) a few weeks ago, I was excited to fall back into her world. This story revolves around two college students, a couple named Sylvie and Gabe, who become assistants to their professor, Dr. Adrian Keller. Dr. Keller studies dreaming, in particular lucid dreaming, and teaching patients to lucid dream in order to help relieve stress and anxiety. I found the information about the sleep studies and dreaming really interesting, and ended up doing a little digging outside of the book about it.
Sylvie and Gabe become fully immersed in this research, to the point that they drop out of school and begin following Dr. Keller around the country to assist with his experiments and studies. In one town, Sylvie and Gabe become friends with their neighbors, another couple, and this is where their idyllic situation starts to unravel. Questions of ethics around their studies arise, in ways that I won’t spoil for you, but the story definitely takes a turn I wasn’t expecting! It is told from the viewpoint of Sylvie, and you see her grow from young naive college student into a much more aware and informed older adult.