Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a young adult mystery about Sade Hussein, new girl at the prestigious boarding school: Alfred Noble Academy, who discovers dark secrets amongst the school after her roommate disappears without a trace. 

This was one of my top 3 most anticipated releases for 2024 and I have some things I loved about it and some things I hated. Let’s get into it.

I was hooked from literally the first page! (Honestly from the author’s note! I really appreciated the mention of Oluwatoyin Salau) The writing gripped me immediately and I was IN LOVE! I loved the atmosphere of the novel. The dark academia vibe is going to get me every time! I loved several of the characters. Sade, Persephone, & Baz were so amazing and their chemistry was perfect! I enjoyed other characters as well! As a huge Mean Girls fan (it’s literally my favorite movie of all time), I absolutely LOVED all the subtle, and not-so-subtle, Mean Girls references! And I also loved the unreliable narrator feel to Sade’s POV!

But the pacing of this novel was sooooo slow! Even toward the beginning of the novel, I was loving it so much, but it felt like no matter how much I was reading I couldn’t make any progress. I feel like the book could’ve been at least 60 pages shorter. And it’s not that a whole lot of unnecessary things were happening, it’s that they should’ve happened quicker & more succinctly. I also don’t like that it took so long for us to know ANYTHING. I feel like it would’ve been much better if the story unfolded little by little rather than a whole bunch of build up and then everything gets dumped on you at the end. Speaking of the end, the end was the slowest part… We went in circles forever and it just kept going and going. I just wanted them to get to the point. And by the time the truth was finally revealed, I didn’t care anymore. Plus the reveals were disappointing. My theories were way more interesting than what actually happened. And I was left with several questions at the end. Multiple things were alluded to as part of the mystery and then were never revisited. I think this novel would be better as an hour-and-a-half long movie because the pacing could be much faster and the story can stay interesting!

I do appreciate the commentary in this novel and I enjoyed several things about it like the characters and atmosphere, but the pacing really dampened my enjoyment. Maybe I was comparing it to this author’s previous novel, Ace of Spades, because it was super fast paced and I expected the same energy in this one. But slow pace never really works for me, so people that enjoy slow burn mysteries may enjoy this more!

Thank you to Netgalley and Feiwel and Friends for this arc. All opinions are my own.

TW: sexual assault (non-graphic but a recurring theme), misogyny, suicide, death of a parent, child neglect, domestic abuse (briefly mentioned), and discussions of grief