Friday 11 December 2020

Sleepless by Louise Mumford

Sleepless

Don’t close your eyes. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t let them in.

Thea is an insomniac; she hasn’t slept more than three hours a night for years.

So when an ad for a sleep trial that promises to change her life pops up on her phone, Thea knows this is her last chance at finding any kind of normal life.

Soon Thea’s sleeping for longer than she has in a decade, and awakes feeling transformed. So much so that at first she’s willing to overlook the oddities of the trial – the lack of any phone signal; the way she can’t leave her bedroom without permission; the fact that all her personal possessions are locked away, even her shoes.

But it soon becomes clear that the trial doesn’t just want to help Thea sleep. It wants to control her sleep…



This sounded really interesting, but sadly I found I wasn't enjoying it very much. Although there were certainly sections where I was tense and wanted to find out what would happen next, there were also plenty of sections where nothing happened for so long that, ironically, I almost fell asleep.

As in a lot of this type of book, the main character is never sure who to trust or who's telling the truth, which meant that I, the reader, never really knew what was going on either. And, unless I missed something huge, there was no resolution at the end; a large plot thread was just left there, unfinished.

I liked some of the characters; not wanting to give anything away, my favourites included an angry B&B manager and a frizzy haired chocoholic. But they couldn't save this story for me, which is a shame, because the idea of it was great, and fantastically creepy. There's also a really great dream sequence which, unlike most invented dream sequences, really felt like a dream. These things just didn't weigh up against the rest.

Not for me, this one.


No comments:

Post a Comment