Sidney Sheldon's book Tell Me Your Dreams carries a dark theme. It focuses on the central character, Ashley Patterson, who represents a seemingly well-adjusted, successful, and attractive young working professional. Deep inside though, she is experiencing stormy emotions. A product of traumatic childhood experiences and unfulfilling adult life, she is a walking disaster, ready to explode. She is proof that parental abuse can strongly affect an individual's future behaviour and life. The power of parental nurturing cannot be underestimated, and lack of respect by a parent for a helpless child can produce trauma, shattered dreams, and disastrous results which the child carries into adulthood.
Perennial bestseller Sheldon doesn't get under the reader's skin here, as he does at his best, even though he brings together many of his time-tested elements- childhood trauma and its consequences; lust and murder as bedfellows; a beautiful, innocent heroine; good men in the legal and medical professions trying to undo the wrongs done by others. Despite the gory crime scene depictions, the old master, uncharacteristically, has left out the suspense and the layers of feeling.
The Plot
Ashley Patterson is a brainy and gorgeous 'computer whiz' with a cushy job at a fast-growing start-up computer graphics company in Silicon Valley. She is lonely, shy, and lives a life that she finds very unfulfilling. She is also absolutely convinced that someone is stalking her. Toni Prescott and Alette Peters are both colleagues of Ashley’s. However, the similarities end there.
Toni is a saucy, British vixen with a penchant for online dating and dancing at discotheques. Alette is an aspiring artist who loves quiet, dreamy weekends spent in the arms of handsome painters. Reminiscent of high school, Toni and Alette do their best to keep goody-two-shoes Ashley out of their cool clique but find it extremely difficult after a string of murders irrevocably binds their lives together. Toni, Alette, and Ashley know almost nothing about each other until all three women are inexplicably linked into a murder investigation that leads to one of the most bizarre trials of the century.
The best thing about Sheldon novels is their ability to completely immerse the reader in the ocean of the plot. You smile when the protagonist begins a love story, cry when they have a heartbreak, and laugh the evilest laugh when she takes her revenge.
Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon is a work of fiction but is based on several actual cases. I enjoyed this book and found it to be an interesting read. I was hooked by the plot and wanted to discover what happened next. I also loved the educative side of this book. I mean, I was really enlightened, so I’ll give it that. Another great part was the unpredictability of it. It was so very unexpected, and the turns of events honestly took me by surprise and got me admiring the intelligence of the author. The book is fast-paced and keeps you on edge throughout the ride. Just when you think you're done, and the book is about to come to an end, you read the last four lines, and your mind is blown!
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