Samantha Friedman is married to a distant, cynical husband, Bob.  They have three children: a 17-year-old daughter, Cammy, whom they adopted, and 8-year-old twin boys, Jamie and Andrew.

Sam is frustrated with her sexless marriage and, despite her many attempts to rejuvenate their marriage, Bob is unresponsive.  She knows he’s having affairs and now has a sense of "nothingness" in the relationship, that they are drifting off into their own worlds.  When Sam eventually meets another man who shows an interest in her, Craig Riggs, her attraction to him is natural. Even though Sam feels there’s little hope for her marriage, she keeps the relationship on a friendship level.

While her marriage seems a shambles, what hurts Sam the most is the distant relationship with her daughter and, more than anything, Sam wants to reconnect with Cammy.  They were once close, shared confidences and good times.  Now her daughter has turned rebellious, wearing Goth clothing and makeup, cuts classes and has started using drugs.  These are physical manifestations of Cammy’s desire to separate herself from her family—a family to which she feels she does not belong.

The teen years are difficult enough, but we learn through her journal entries that Cammy has known she was adopted since an early age. She resents the attention paid to her younger brothers and, curious about her birth mother, Cammy forges documents to learn more about her past.  When she learns her birth mother’s name and location, Cammy’s emotions sink, and the consequences are devastating.

Sleepwalking in Daylight is an amazing novel and one of the best books I’ve read in years.  Elizabeth Flock is a master at revealing family emotions and providing a poignant, eloquent rendering of a dysfunctional family, the emotional highs and lows of struggling to make a bond that could help heal emotional pain, but never succeeds.  This mesmerizing author captured my attention from the first sentence and I could not put the book down until it was finished. As I closed the book, I was determined that I would never "sleepwalk in daylight" where my family is concerned. Highly recommended!