ARC Review: Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

youngcreativepress

2 years ago

Synopsis:

It’s like I keep stumbling into a dark room, searching for the switch to make things bright again. To make me remember. But the switch isn’t there. Was it there before?

Sade Hussein is starting her third year of high school, this time at the prestigious Alfred Nobel Academy boarding school. After being home-schooled all her life and feeling like a magnet for misfortune, she’s not sure what will happen. What she doesn’t expect though is for her roommate Elizabeth to disappear after Sade’s first night. Or for people to think she had something to do with it.

With rumors swirling around her, Sade catches the attention of the most popular girls in school – collectively known as the ‘Unholy Trinity’ – and they bring her into their fold. Between learning more about them – especially Persephone, who Sade finds herself drawn to – playing catch-up in class, and trying to figure out what happened to Elizabeth, Sade has a lot on her plate. It doesn’t help that she’s already dealing with grief from the many tragedies in her family.

And then a student is found dead.

The more Sade investigates, the more she realizes there’s more to Alfred Nobel Academy and its students than she realized. Secrets lurk around every corner and beneath every surface…secrets that rival even her own.

Review:

While Sleeping Girls Lie is my first book by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and I don’t think it will be my last.

When you first start this book, you think it is centred around a missing person, but that’s just one of the many threads that unravel. Elizabeth disappearing feels like the catalyst for this mystery, but the further in you get, you realise that this story has been in the making for quite some time.

I definitely would have rated this higher if the pacing was just a little faster. Parts of this book feel like walking through sludge, I would spend hours reading and feel like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I personally feel like too much time was spent on mundane school days. It also didn’t help that Goodreads has it listed as having over 100 pages less than it does. If I knew while reading that this is over 550 pages, I would have understood the slower pace.

There are also a few minor plot points that don’t come to satisfying conclusions. I’m not going to mention anything specifically as there are huge spoilers, but it would have been nice to have these mentioned.

As someone who has had guinea pigs for almost eight years, every time the guinea pig was mentioned made me so sad. Firstly, it’s kept in a science lab at the school – why?! Secondly, I know Baz liberated it for a good reason but it’s treated so badly. If you read this book, please never feed a guinea pig muffins or keep one on its own in a tiny travel cage. This is a very nit-picky thing to complain about but it made me a little angry as a guinea pig owner.

Other than his mistreatment of said guinea pig, Baz was my favourite character. He’s there for comic relief and I adored his relationship with Sade. This was pretty much the only light part of this book, but these moments were very much needed to break up the intensity.

There were so many characters that I enjoyed, even if some of them were bad people. Pretty much every character in this book is lying about who they are and their involvement in the mystery. It was so fun trying to figure out who was telling the truth.

I also really enjoyed the back-and-forth with Sade and Persephone, but the romantic element of this felt very empty. You could definitely tell that this was where their relationship was going, but even by the end, nothing was concrete. Most of their interactions were very business-like. You could sense the chemistry between them, but I wish more happened with them.

Overall, Where Sleeping Girls Lie was a great mystery but it definitely has pacing issues. I think I would have enjoyed this even more if it had been shorter and had a greater sense of urgency. The cast of characters was complex and interesting and it handled some dark topics very well.