Review: Sleepless

Sleepless
Author: Lou Morgan
Publication Date: 5th January, 2015
Publisher: Stripes Publishing
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

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, you were crazy. A lot of crazy. This will probably be short because Sleepless is that book you don't have a lot to say about. You know the ones...you liked it enough, you didn't hate it, but there wasn't anything that made you love it. Whether it was the writing, the characters, the story, etc, etc.

I really wanted to love Sleepless, I did, and it started off great, and I was on my way to thinking I would love it, but somewhere along the way I just...didn't. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but it was a bit of everything, I think The writing was fine, but it's in third person, which i always find harder to connect with to start with anyway, the characters were fine, didn't love anyone, didn't hate anyone, they acted like teenagers, the social circle ran the way it usually would in their financial situation. They felt a little 2D though, we got to know more about Izzy than anything, since it's the character it's focused on, but the others...not so much.  The pacing was a major issue for me, like I said, it started fine, but around halfway it got slower and dropped, it was a lot more inner turmoil than anything, and I got bored, but the thing I did love about that was that you didn't know what was real or in Izzy's head.

Thiis why you don't buy random pills off the internet, you've heard of side effects, now imagine these side effects. This is where the disbelief comes in, to be honest, it's a little stretch, we do get a brief explanation, not enough to make it believable, and while that does irk me, the whole thing plays out like a movie, which is the fun easy to read part. Now, the one thing that did really annoy me was the ending. It feels incomplete. Not just the what happened to the characters at the end? It is implied, so that didn't annoy me as much as the fact that the whole storyline felt incomplete, there's a lot of loose ties in the plotline-especially when it comes to the pills and that video.

The major appeal of Sleepless is the way it reads, as I said, it has this film feel to it, and some of the scenes are quite disturbing as well as insane and I enjoyed that about it, and I did enjoyed it, but for me, there wasn't enough of anything to make me love it.

Rating: 3/5