Sleepless book review

Sleepless by Lou Morgan
on October 1, 2014
Goodreads

Young, rich and good-looking, Izzy and her friends lead seemingly perfect lives. But exams are looming and at a school like Clerkenwell, failure is not an option. Luckily, Tigs has a solution. A small pill that will make revision a breeze and help them get the results they need. Desperate to succeed, the group begin taking the study drug. It doesn't take long before they realize there are far worse things than failing a few exams.

Sleepless was a book I bought at my very first YALC after watching the author on one of the panels and thought that it was something that I would be interested in. I wish that I had read it back then because I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The story follows a group of high school students who are under extreme pressure to perform well at the end of year exams and so take a performance aid that has some very unexpected side effects. This book was so creepy in that respect, and it definitely left me reeling with how everything ended up happening. I did find the writing to be a little on the young side which is why I think I would have preferred to have read it when I was younger, but I did enjoy it.

The characters were probably my least favourite part of this book, purely because I thought they were quite stereotypical all the way through and lacked the depth I usually want in my characters. There were also quite a few off them and I didn’t really get to connect with any of them, which was a little bit of an issue especially as this book gets quite emotive throughout. The relationships throughout this book felt really rushed, and I think the big thing that stood out for me in Sleepless would have to be the fact that I couldn’t imagine any of the characters having a life outside of this story.

The best bit of Sleepless would definitely be the suspense that this book creates all the way. It took my breath away with some of the things that happened. I never saw what happened as even being a possibility and I loved that part of the story purely because it never really happens for me all that often, I usually guess what is going to happen way beforehand. I really enjoyed the fact that although the pills cause the initial side effects that it’s actually the lack of sleep that causes the issues. Super scary.

I think the worst part of Sleepless would definitely have to be the ending and the fact that so much of the book is left unexplained. I understand why and how it happened but I think I would have liked to have an epilogue where it explained how everything happened and why. But maybe I’m overthinking it a little. I also didn’t quite understand why they never got their parents involved, I know that they shouldn’t have taken the pills but things escalated really quickly and they really should have gotten an adult involved. That would have been the more realistic situation to have happened.

I do think I would recommend Sleepless, purely because it was a rare book for me in the sense that it actually shocked me. I think it is quite thrilling, but is definitely aimed at a younger audience so maybe keep that in mind if you’re going to pick it up!

Have you read anything like Sleepless? What would you recommend? Let me know in the comments.