Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough
- Published on
- Shalini
- in Book Posts, Book Reviews, Digital Reads Media, Digital Reads PR, Digital Reads Reviews, Fiction
Publication Date: April 2022
Book Links
Blurb
Emma Averell loves her life—her high-powered legal career, her two beautiful children, and her wonderful stay-at-home husband—but it wasn’t always so perfect.
When she was just five years old, Emma and her older sister went into foster care because of a horrific incident with their mother.
Her sister can remember a time when their mother was loving and “normal,” but Emma can only remember her as one thing—a monster.
And that monster emerged right around their mother’s fortieth birthday, the same age Emma is approaching now.
Emma desperately wants to keep her successful life separate from her past, so she has always hidden her childhood trauma.
But then she’s unable to sleep, and now losing time during the day, also one of the first symptoms her mother showed.
Is the madness in her blood, just as her mother predicted?
Could she end up hurting her family in her foggy, frenetic state?
Or is she truly beginning to lose her mind?
My Review
What was it all about
Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough was an intriguing thriller that had a different ending, almost a non-linear one.
Emma was approaching forty, and she thought she would become a victim of the madness her mother suffered from. And slowly she lost sleep over it until full-blown insomnia took over her life.
In the same time frame, she got to know two things: her sister’s appearance and her mother was reaching her life’s end in a nursing home.
The only fear that insomnia brought was – would she hurt her family as her mother hurt her sister?
How it made me feel - The Good
The first two-thirds of the book was haunting where I could feel the madness enveloping the main character. The aura that Emma gave off had me fearing for her life as she slowly unraveled
Fortunately, the lawyer in her and her analytical mind prevailed, and she fought her growing lack of sleep to investigate into her past further.
The Bad
The lines were repetitive about her loss of sleep and sanity. The words of a song made an appearance, quite frequently, that didn’t appeal to the thriller side of me.
The writing itself brought down my interest in the last one-third. The whole twist in the story was brought on by some extra sensory perception which might or might not work. For me, it didn’t work.
The Conclusion
The beginning was good, but the ending turned out to be not so great. The spiral into near-insanity had some great believable moments.
I downloaded the digital version of the book from an online retail, and this is my journey down its pages, straight from the heart. STRICTLY HONEST and UNBIASED.
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One Response
Too bad this one didn’t work, Shalini. I have read other books by this author and had high hopes for this one.