Where Sleeping Girls Lie

• Author: Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé
• Genre: YA Mystery
• Publication Date: March 19, 2024
• Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Thank you to NetGalley and Feiwel & Friends for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: sexual assault, rape, suicide, suicidal ideation, grief, death of family members (including parents), murder, alcohol use, emotional abuse, anxiety, misogyny, rape culture, mention of drug use and drugging, trauma

In Where Sleeping Girls Lie ― a YA contemporary mystery by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, the New York Times-bestselling author of Ace of Spades ― a girl new to boarding school discovers dark secrets and coverups after her roommate disappears.

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.

I was so intrigued by this premise. It seemed to have all the elements that I love in a story—dark academia, a missing roommate, secrets galore, and a girl trying to solve a mystery while acclimating to boarding school after being homeschooled her whole life. So I went into this read with high hopes and really looking forward to it. 

I got pulled into the story pretty quickly. The pace is moderately fast at the start of the story, when we get introduced to the major players in the story and the setting. We don’t really get to see a lot of background on any of the characters, aside from Sade, and even the info that we know about her is limited. It’s revealed slowly over the course of the story, but what is obvious is that Sade is struggling with some mental health issues, as well as crushed under the weight of grief and guilt. There are several scenes in the book where Sade has symptoms of anxiety, and flashbacks to her trauma, although there are some pretty severe symptoms in the beginning of the book that just pretty much disappear from the middle of the story. 

While Sade’s character was the closest to being fully fleshed out, even she felt like a puzzle that was still missing a few pieces. I found it easy to like her, although I did want to get to know more about her. The side characters are even less fleshed out, only providing one or two main aspects of their personality in lieu of examining who they really are, what else there is to know about them, and what happened in their life to make them who they became in that moment.

There was definitely a pacing issue in the story, and I think part of that was related to the length of the book. This one ended at 416 pages, and it easily could have been 100 pages shorter. While the beginning of the story was moderately faster-paced, it slowed down quite a bit for the middle portion of the story, leading to a rushed ending. The author wrapped everything up rather abruptly at the very end of the book. 

Despite all these issues, I actually didn’t really mind the slow-burn mystery where everyone had secrets to hide and plenty of red herrings made it difficult to identify who the villain really was. I tried to guess who was behind everything, but was surprised at how everything played out in the end. Things got a bit over the top, but that didn’t bother me too much either. 

What really got me was the way a sapphic romance was shoehorned into the story at 94% without it feeling believable in any way. For starters, it really didn’t have any major effect on the plot aside from it making it easy to wrap everything up neatly and quickly with a minimum of fuss. Second of all is the fact that of the two people, the attraction was really only believable on one side. For Sade, she spent the entire book thinking about a gazillion things, but not one of them was the female character that we are supposed to believe that she’s been wanting to make a move on for weeks? I find it difficult to buy into the fact that she is romantically interested in a girl that she’s been so focused on having as a friend for the entirety of the book. And on top of that, the writing felt incredibly cliched in some places. I caught myself rolling my eyes when I came across sentences like this:

“Sade was tired of goodbyes, but it seemed they had yet to grow tired of her.”

Overall, this could have been a four star read for me, but it wound up being a meh book. I would have loved for it to have more character development and a bit of tightening up of the plot, because that could have elevated this from an average book that doesn’t really stand out to a knockout. I appreciated that it addressed some really important issues that young adults do face, including grief, anxiety, trauma, and rape culture, especially in settings where it isn’t always addressed, such as in a school setting.  Ultimately, it was one of those middle-of-the-road books that I’ll probably not think about again after the end of this month.

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