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The struggle to get Frankie to speak unfolds along with Georgia's own search for inner peace, if not love, which she is hard-pressed to find. Georgia's choices at times border on mistakes. The two men who figure most prominently in her life are both grappling with their own demons: Graham is a parasomniac with a fearsome case of sleepwalking, when he can sleep at all, and Charlie has fled the ordinary social world to live alone on the water after a life-changing personal loss. Georgia has her troubles with sleep, and the novel is not just about the watery abyss below us but also the dark sea surrounding our nocturnal selves. Georgia and Graham decide to live on a houseboat he christens "Lullaby," but the troubled couple is hardly being sung to sleep aboard it. Charlie offers a healing place of refuge for both Georgia and Frankie at Stiltsville, but his rambling house on pilings slapped by choppy waves can be the site of parental nightmares. As the novel turns into its final, suspenseful chapters, the voice of Georgia is at times softly rocking, almost elegiac. Of all the characters in her life, clearly the one she loves most of all is her mysteriously silent son, Frankie. ___ Online:
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