Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this eARC of 'Where Sleeping Girls Lie' by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé.

It's no secret that I adore Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and this book is no exception. 'Where Sleeping Girls Lie' is such a beautifully well written book set in academia with intriguing mystery and thrills, and a fun character who had a love for jammie dodgers which basically made my day. I fell down a rabbit hole with Sade, unsure who to trust and the twists just made me fall deeper and deeper. If you loved Faridah's 'Ace of Spades' definitely run to your nearest bookstore and buy this immediately when it comes out.

I knew Ace of Spades was going to be hard to live up to, and this book didn't. It was still a good read, but one that had me feeling less invested.

It took me quite a long time to get into this. At around the 30% mark I felt like things were finally starting to become interesting. And the second half was definitely a lot stronger. But plot driven books don't work very well for me unless I develop a close attachment to the characters, which didn't happen in this book. I didn't find the characters particularly interesting, and I didn't feel like I got to know them very well at all.

Sade Hussein had always been homeschooled but following her father's death (and the death of anyone she's ever loved) she starts attending Alfred Noble Academy, a private school for the children of the elite. Sade could not prepare herself for life surrounded by so many peers, including the Unholy Trinity, the It girls at the school and her new house sister Elizabeth.

Soon after arriving Elizabeth goes missing so Sade and Elizabeth's best friend Basil begin to investigate and uncover even more of the school's dark secrets than they could ever have imagined.

I love Faridah's books. Her writing is brilliantly addictive and easy to read, she's a natural born storyteller. I particularly love how she is able to blend thriller with elements of social commentary where rhe discussion points blend seamlessly with the flow of the book.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie takes a lot of reference from popular high school media, especially my all tim favourite Mean Girls, giving it a very familiar and tongue in cheek feel. This book however celebrates diverse identities with a whole main cast of BIPOC and queer characters with various mental health issues in a setting where this is the norm and accepted. People are very complicated and this book doesn't shy away from how complex we are.

Compared to Ace of Spades I would say that this book is more like typical YA thriller in the vein of Holly Jackson or Karen M. McManus but still an overall great read.

Not really the book for me, unfortunately. I found the plot very boring and uneventful, nothing happens for large portions of the book and every character felt sort of two dimensional. The writing was okay but the dialogue was cringe and awkward sometimes which didn't help with my enjoyment. However if YA mystery is your genre I'm sure you could enjoy this.

A girl new to Alfred Nobel Academy boarding school discovers dark secrets and cover ups after her roommate disappears.

This book was absolutely incredible! This is one that I’m going to be thinking about for a long time because of the incredible job Faridah did with covering such incredibly important topics! They made me so angry for the characters experiencing different things because it was so relatable. I felt like I was there with the characters and I could picture everything that had happened within the book, so clearly.

I found this book so hard to put down and I am so sad that it is now over. I truly loved everything about this book, from the boarding school setting, the stunning characters and their development to the incredible writing! Faridah truly never misses with her books, I am obsessed with her and her writing and I already cannot wait for her next book to be released! I already know that this is going to be one of my favourite books of the year!

⚠️ CWs: sexual assault, rape, suicide ad suicidal ideation, grief, death of family members, cursing, panic attack, person with substance use disorder, possession and distribution of indecent pictures of minors; mentions cheating, animal death, drug use, derogatory language, lesbophobia, child abuse, mental health illness, racism ⚠️

3.5/5

Thanks to the author and Usborne for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Overall, I enjoyed this story! I really liked the British boarding school vibe and I found the mystery engaging (and I didn’t guess any of the twists which is always a great sign). I loved the character diversity and LGBTQ+ rep. Without spoiling anything, Where Sleeping Girls Lie offers commentary and discourse on some very important societal issues, and I thought this was all done really sensitively but also poignantly.

However, for a YA mystery/dark academia it is quite a long book and actually took me quite a while to get into. I found some of the characters to be a bit 2D and lacking in complex development – we didn’t get a lot of backstory beyond Sade and a few others, and I would also have liked to have seen more of one relationship in particular (no spoilers), that was being vaguely alluded to throughout, but I would have liked to see more complex interactions between these characters.

There’s quite a lot of build up in the story, and then a lot happens at once towards the end – that can often work, but in this instance it was all tied up a bit too quickly for me!

I was also maybe expecting the vibes of the whole story to be a bit more mysterious or creepy, but maybe I just went in with the wrong expectations (and I also know that I don’t read as much YA as others, so maybe that impacted my expectations a bit – I don’t rate books based on this because I know that that is very much a me issue).

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a fun and engaging YA dark academia mystery, with amazing rep and a great message and I recommend fans of the genre dig in! It just isn’t a new favourite.

So. I read Ace of Spades as an ARC back in 2021 and I can’t really explain the way I was truly obsessed with this book. I read it in four days, bought a physical copy when it came out, talked about it to other people, etc. It was one of my favourite reads that year and it put Faridah very firmly on my list of authors to watch. Imagine my excitement when I was offered a chance to read her sophomore book early.

Well. Where Sleeping Girls Lie just didn’t hit the same. It’s hard not to compare to her debut because there are a lot of shared elements and themes between the two, but I couldn’t help noticing that WSGL lacked the spark, the excitement, and the punch of AOS.

One of the major faults is just how uneventful it was. The pacing felt so slow and only by around 80% in did I find myself thinking “Oh, something’s actually happening now”. Threads are picked up and then dropped for so long that by the time they came back around, I didn’t care anymore. Or things went unexplained for so long that I feel they became largely irrelevant to the plot. I wasn’t necessarily bored but I did feel like I was in a perpetual state of waiting for the story to pick up. the overall plot was not as groundbreaking or exciting as the one in AOS, but I appreciated what it wanted to say.

The characters were also a little lacklustre. Chiamaka and Devon from AOS felt well-written, they were relatable in ways, and they had personality. Sade, as the main character in WSIG, didn’t really have much personality outside of her trauma. Who was she, as a person? I don’t really know. The side characters were okay, although I will say that I really liked the sense of intrigue and duplicity written into the male characters like August and Jude. This will probably be an unpopular opinion but I didn’t care for Baz as the best friend at all; his manic pixie dream boy schtick got tired real quick.

I’m not so sure about how good the writing was in general. The whole book felt like it could have done with another thorough edit, and definitely a cut down in length by at least 100 pages. Some of the dialogue also felt stilted and clunky. the story ultimately had an interesting and relevant message but I struggled to feel much depth from the writing.

I didn’t dislike this book, I think I just had very high expectations following AOS and with the similarities between the two I wasn’t expecting quite so many differences in quality. I would absolutely still go ahead and read more books by Faridah (I’ve still got Four Eids and a Funeral on my reading list) and would love to see her branch out to stories perhaps with an older cast, set outside of high school, or not focused on elite teens.

Massive thanks to Usborne Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review!

There was a lot going on in this book and a lot of it felt unnecessary. I feel as though there were too many things happening that we lost focus of the plot a bit. A lot of it also felt far fetched?

However the whole idea of people who are wealthy get away with a lot HITS SO TRUE!

Overall it isn't as good as Ace of Spades but I did enjoy this and would recommend!

this book is good and it went in a direction i wasn't expecting. i loved sade and baz, i wished the other girls were more developed. this could have been a perfect thriller but the pacing was horrible. you could cut almost 100 pages of this book and it would still be slow paced

This was an amazing book, and I expected nothing less from the author of Ace of spades.

I absolutely loved Sade, she had a hilarious dry sense of humour, she had a mysterious past and a glimpse of a dark side that had you wondering where this would go. I also loved the other characters in this book - Baz and Persephone and the adorable Guinea pig Muffin made a great team. At first I wasn’t sure if I liked Persephone because of how hot and cold she was, but when she finally came into the group and opened up a bit more I liked her. There were some characters that I kind of liked but kind of didn’t - like April and Miss Blackburn. I also loved how diverse the characters in this were! It’s an international school so there were plenty of POC characters, and there was also a couple of LGBTQ+ relationships.

The boarding school setting was done nicely and it was so intense it seemed like a cult sometimes. It was a little cliche at times: a headmaster who doesn’t care to listen to students concerns, a group of popular boys who everyone’s loves and hates. But it wasn’t TOO cliche. There were so many mysteries in this book all being unravelled at once, which meant it kept your interest the whole time.

Overall this was a great story with good and bad parts to the ending, but I think this kept it realistic. I’d definitely recommend this.

I have been desperately waiting for this book for years. I absolutely loved Ace of Spades back when it debuted in 2021, and I have been waiting oh so patiently to get my hands on Àbíké-Íyímídé's sophomore novel ever since.

And goddamn, were my expectations blown wide out of the water.

Àbíké-Íyímídé's writing is exceptional. She paints such beautiful, vivid pictures with her descriptions, her dialogue is engaging, the kind of realism I aim for in my own writing, and the mystery kept me on the edge of my seat from the beginning to the end. Yes, it is incredibly slow-paced, and the story is nearly 600 pages, but her ability to capture you with the setting and characters well make up for it.

God, I could gush about so many aspects of the book, but refraining is needed here. I wholeheartedly recommend anyone go into this book blind and with patience, because, I promise you, it's so worth it.

All in all, read this when it comes out! Àbíké-Íyímídé is an amazing writer, and I will be reading everything her hand has touched!

Where Sleeping Girls Lie follows Sade, a teenage girl, who is going to her first ever boarding school. Sade’s past feels shrouded in some dark secrets but we do know that she’s lost both her Mum and her Dad. Within 24hours of finding herself in this new boarding school Sade’s roommate, and the first friend she’s made, mysteriously disappears. It doesn’t take long for Sade to quickly realise that things aren’t adding up and we’re soon sucked deeper and deeper into the secrets lurking at underneath the boarding schools gothic elegance. The vibes are immaculate here - dark academia, mysterious, brooding - just perfect for a boarding school mystery.

The characters all felt nuanced, diverse, and there was a full host of interesting characters. There were a couple of cliches and tropes but they didn’t detract from this being a really enjoyable read.

WSGL is a very steadily paced. I wouldn’t say it was slow but there’s no ramping up or fast paced scenes really. Which I do think is a bit of a shame as I imagine some pace build up would have really added to the suspense. But because of the pacing I think WSGL leans more towards being a mystery than a thriller.

It did take me a few chapters to get into this, I wasn’t sure where we were going at the start and there seemed to be a few too many cliches for me taste but the more I read the hooked I became! There was a very weird Mean Girls throw back (new girl at school, befriends a bit of an outcast who has an outgoing gay male best friend. They’re sat in the cafeteria and three beautiful girls walk in -cue the gay best friend telling the new girl all about the cliques. This new outcast friend used to be BFFs with the central popular girl before they mysteriously fell out… Flash forward and the popular trio invite the new girl to have lunch with them) It was a little weird reading these scenes play out as they were so similar to the film but thankfully things quickly diverge in a more interesting direction.

There wasn’t anything particularly unexpected or any twists that I didn’t think were a little predictable - but this didn’t hinder my enjoyment at all.

Also I couldn’t review this without mentioning the slow burn - urgh it was brilliantly done! I also loved how much queer representation was effortlessly interwoven here - it felt like natural elements to the story and not like it was thrown in just to tick a box.

This is my first time reading anything by this author but I’m now on my way to look into the rest of her work as this was a really well written and enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an E-ARC

TW: rape, sexual assault, suicide, death of a parent, murder and more.

after reading ace of spades, I knew that I HAD to read anything by this author because it would blow me away- and I was absolutely right. this is the first time in MONTHS I’ve finished a book in one day, I was unable to put it down from the moment I started it.

this book has such a beautiful atmosphere, really highlighting the dark academia elements we all love. the prestigious schools, the gorgeous artwork and architecture, the privileged rich kids, the uneven sense of justice. you can tell there was a lot of thought out into how this book was constructed and it paid off.

the plot? absolutely phenomenal. like I said, from the very first page you’re interested and you’re thrown right into the deep end of trauma and darkness. the mysteries throughout were so intelligently written that I genuinely had no idea what was going on until the author wanted me to, even when I thought I was being smart and on the right track. the plot twists and discoveries were written in a way that kept you hooked but didn’t reveal too much too soon, it was a very steady but enjoyable read.

let’s not forget about the representation. we’ve got lesbians, we’ve got bisexuals, we’ve got Asian women, black women, gay men and so much more. the thing I ADORED the most? In this book, being gay was just that. It wasn’t like this big thing where everyone had to come out and it wasn’t everyone’s major plot point, we could just see gay characters existing and having character points that were nothing to do with their sexuality. and my favourite? angry intelligent women who are fucking sick of being told to put up and shut up, women who want to rock the boat and set the system on fire- building a new one from the ashes. angry women, passionate women, women who will change the world.

thank you so much to Net Galley for providing me with a copy of what is an amazing book.

WOW! I am blown away by this book, it was captivating and harrowing and crushing all in one and I could not put it down. I won't publish my full review until after publication as don't want to give any spoilers, but this book is well worth a read

The cover drew me in initially but when I started reading I was hooked and felt immersed in the world of the book and the mysterious atmosphere.

I enjoyed Ace of Spades so was keen to read this when I saw it!

A slow burn of a mystery with great characterisation. I enjoyed this despite its dark content. Sade's story was (at times) a tough one to read and I was grateful for the content warnings. I would recommend this to my students but perhaps with more caution.

I’m really struggling to know how I feel about this one.
On the one hand it’s brilliant and powerful and speaks to the strength of women (particularly those of colour). Yet on the other, it left me feeling very depressed and in despair of toxic masculinity and rich white men in powerful positions. It didn’t really turn out to be about what I expected. It was much darker and disturbing because it focuses on such real upsetting problems.

I’d definitely suggest people check trigger warnings before reading. I should have took more note of them…

There was lots I really liked and appreciated about this.

Loved the dark academia atmosphere. I’m a sucker for an imposing, beautiful boarding school setting.

The characters were so diverse and interesting. I’m always so glad to see more black voices getting published and heard. Plus it was very queer. Although not the main point of the story, so didn’t get as much attention as I might have wanted, I really liked the sapphic and Achillean romances.

And, my main highlight of joy was side character Baz and his secret stolen Guinea pig!

I think the dark subject matter in this book is very important to explore in fiction. It’s a very real problem and too many people don’t get the justice they deserve. I just wasn’t expecting this book to be about what it was and it was a challenge exploring it without warning. (That’s on me, I need to be better at looking at content warnings!!)

I’m aware I’m being fairly vague as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who wants to go in blind.

A very worthwhile read that covers lots of important and sensitive topics. It will unfortunately be very relatable to a lot of people. Although very sad, it was more realistic that things didn’t all get wrapped up completely neatly. Yet there was still a sense of hope at the end.

I definitely recommend, but with caution! This will be a hard read for many and possibly not one to pick up while feeling sensitive and vulnerable.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an E-arc of this in exchange for an honest review.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a reference to an article that is mentioned at the end of the book, once we know the secrets that are kept by the characters we encounter. It is, intentionally, designed to rouse dislike of the misogynistic attitudes that pervade this novel. Appropriately, it is also clear by this point that the girls we encounter during this book do not lie, and have only just found their voice.
Our main character is Sade Hussain, a young girl who is about to start a new life at Alfred Nobel Academy boarding school. She arrives at the school and is taken under the wing of her roommate Elizabeth Wang. Unfortunately, soon after Sadie’s arrival Elizabeth goes missing. For reasons that become clear later, Sade takes it upon herself to look for clues as to what might have happened.
As Sade digs, she unearths secrets that are shocking, though sadly not a surprise given the culture in which we live.
Sade is not what she first appears to be, though we are given plenty of clues throughout the book that alert us to this. The characters are privileged and, perhaps, at times rather like caricatures. However, the sentiments behind the book are timely.
I curious to see what teen readers make of this. Many of my students loved Ace of Spades and while I think this is a welcome exploration of attitudes to consent and how we manage expectations of all involved, I wonder if it is a little drawn-out at times and whether they will find the ease with which Sade is able to find just the right people to help her at the time she needs them just a little implausible.

Teenager Sade enrols at a boarding school following on from the death of her only remaining family member. She is allocated a house sister called Elizabeth with whom she will be sharing a room but after only a day, Elizabeth disappears and in the face of indifference from those in authority, Sade is determined to discover what has happened to her.
After a strong start, the mystery slowly unfolds. We know that Sade has secrets in her past and her anxiety hints at the trauma she has experienced. As the new girl she has to make all new friendships and her relationship with Baz offers a lightness which contrasts well with the dark themes of the book. The book has themes of power and privilege as well as sexual assault, grief and suicide, all of which are written without being heavy handed. The complex and diverse cast of characters is easy to keep track of because they are so well crafted.

This was a fab YA novel, the only thing that I would criticise is that I think this would have done brilliantly as a series, there was so much background and I would have loved to have watched the characters develop more and uncover more about their shady pasts, upbringing and the who why’s and what’s or how they all ended up attended ANA. (The school)

Set in a boarding school in the uk we meet Sade Hussein on her first day at ANA , this book goes straight in and doesn’t miss any details. There are lots of taboo subjects covered and the characters are all well developed but I would love to read more about some of the less popular characters too.

All in all this is a book I won’t forget, thank you to NetGalley the author and the publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review