Tag: Where Sleeping Girls Lie

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and if you’re a fellow Coloradan, happy Election Day! Get your ballots in by 7 pm today for them to be counted! (And preferably cast your vote for Julie Gonzales for Senate—we need somebody truly progressive, not another AIPAC-backed old white dude in office.)

I was a fan of Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s Ace of Spades back when it first came out in 2021. Even though it’d been almost five years since I’d read a book of hers, I figured I’d give Where Sleeping Girls Lie a shot. Although it was by no means perfect, Where Sleeping Girls Lie was still a tense and fast-paced mystery.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Where Sleeping Girls Lie – Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Sade Hussein is ready to start over—no matter the cost. Freshly an orphan and homeschooled all her life, she’s enrolled in Alfred Noble Academy, a cutthroat boarding school where only the most privileged earn a spot. She has her reservations, but she finds comfort in Elizabeth, her roommate and fellow outsider. But when Elizabeth goes missing and the faculty of ANA doesn’t seem to care, Sade knows that the school has something sinister lurking beneath the surface—and she’ll do anything to expose it.

TW/CW: rape/sexual assault themes, suicide, animal death, substance abuse, murder, loss of loved ones

WARNING: this review contains spoilers! Proceed with caution if you want to read this book and haven’t yet.

It’s been almost five years since I read Ace of Spaces. My tastes have inevitably shifted a bit. But it says something that Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s writing feels just as sharp, even though I’m no longer in the target audience. Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a timely mystery that kept me hooked!

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé has still got it. Where Sleeping Girls Lie is, for the most part, both excellently plotted and paced. This book is just over 400 pages (on my Kindle edition, at least), and I managed to blow through it in only two days. (Yes, I know I’m a fast reader, but for me, that’s still saying something.) Every beat of the mystery of Elizabeth’s mystery—and the sinister underbelly of ANA that gets exposed in the process—was meticulously planned, and I loved how the back-and-forth between Sade and Baz developed along with the clues they discovered. It was so grippingly written, and Àbíké-Íyímídé did such an excellent job of spreading the mystery and reveals out in a logical but still fast-paced way, giving enough breathing room between reveals to keep me hooked for the whole novel.

I also really enjoyed the dynamic between Sade and the other characters. Although there were times when Àbíké-Íyímídé’s writing felt a little too YA and her humor didn’t always land, she did a fantastic job writing the effortless rapport between all of the main characters. The dynamic between Sade and Baz was sweet, but I think I enjoyed the slow-burn romance between Sade and Persephone the most; in an age group where it’s so easy to write halfhearted insta-love, Àbíké-Íyímídé’s gradual, will-they-won’t-they dynamic between the two girls was one that I was rooting for from the start. As with her other novels, there’s diversity aplenty—it’s always so cool to see protagonists like Sade (Black, Muslim, sapphic, and has depression and C-PTSD) in the spotlight, and the diversity in this novel felt so effortless and natural. And as Where Sleeping Girls Lie deals with all manner of slimy, predatory characters, I enjoyed the nuance that Àbíké-Íyímídé applied to the many gross characters (especially Jude and August)—they weren’t cardboard villains, but realistic manipulators who had built up charming exteriors and skirted around the blame for their reprehensible actions.

That brings me to the main theme of Where Sleeping Girls Lie; I put trigger/content warnings at the top of all my reviews, but I would highly suggest keeping them in mind before reading this book. This novel deals a lot with rape culture, sexual assault, and how systemic misogyny protects powerful men from ever facing the consequences of their actions. While this novel is technically a murder mystery, there isn’t a singular “villain” to pin the crime on: the villain is the system, which I think is the best way to do justice to this issue. The resolution isn’t neatly tied in a bow, and all of the bad guys don’t get paraded off to jail; while Sade and the others get some semblance of closure, I liked that Àbíké-Íyímídé didn’t shy away from the fact that more often than not, rapists and misogynists are allowed by our patriarchal system to get off scot-free. Sade also has depression and C-PTSD, and while I can’t speak to the accuracy of the representation, I appreciated Àbíké-Íyímídé’s depiction of how such traumatic events can become deeply embedded into a person like her. It’s a biting indictment of rape culture that pulls no punches—exactly as it should be.

However, Where Sleeping Girls Lie faltered in the handling of its twists. Ultimately, what happens in the next two paragraphs is the main reason this didn’t get the full four stars from me. From the start, there’s the matter of Sade being an unreliable narrator; while Àbíké-Íyímídé maintains this for a solid amount of time, it feels like she all but abandoned the twist with Jamila until the last minute. We get Sade’s hallucinations/dreams about Jamila early on in the book, which were excellent in terms of building up the eerie atmosphere. However, they’re then completely forgotten, and there’s no further indication of Jamila’s role in the story until we get the reveal about her—to say that it’s put on the backburner is an understatement. It’s like Àbíké-Íyímídé completely forgot about her existence and then had to scramble to include her during the Big Reveal (with a capital B). I’m all for a surprise twists, but it feels like after the first 30 pages of the book, there’s hardly any indication that Sade has something that drastic to hide. I find it hard to believe that Sade didn’t even have a handful of fleeting memories of her recently dead twin sister throughout this entire thing.

The same can be said about the twist about Francis at the end of Where Sleeping Girls Lie. I get that the message was supposed to be that the “culprit” of the mystery was meant to be the system of patriarchy/rape culture/misogyny, and I appreciated that choice. But the twist about Jude being offhandedly killed by Francis out of nowhere just didn’t make much sense. Like with Jamila, it felt like Àbíké-Íyímídé had built up this intricate web for the Fishermen plot, and then forgot that there was supposed to be a culprit to the murder, and just threw a dart at one of the more unlikable characters just so that the more nuanced characters didn’t have to take the fall. The rest of the mystery of Where Sleeping Girls Lie was so well plotted that it just felt cheap to pin it on a relatively inconsequential character and move on.

All in all, a gripping YA mystery that grabbed my attention, but failed to clinch the full four stars for the handling of its twists. 3.75 stars!

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a standalone, but Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé has also released Much Ado About Persephone, a short story set after the events of the novel. She is also the author of Ace of Spades, The Heirs, the co-author of Four Eids and a Funeral (with Adiba Jaigirdar), and has contributed to several short story anthologies, including The White Guy Dies First: 13 Stories of Fear and Power, Doctor Who: Origin Stories, Black Joy, and more.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!