Review: Sleep No More by Aprilynne Pike

Goodreads Summary:

Oracles see the future but are never supposed to interfere. Charlotte learned that the hard way. If she hadn't tried to change one of her childhood visions, her father would still be alive. Since the accident, Charlotte has suppressed her visions to avoid making the same mistake. But when she receives a premonition of a classmate's murder, she can no longer ignore her powerful gift.

Then Charlotte meets someone who not only knows her secret but who also has a way for her to stop the killer. He offers to teach her how to manipulate her visions to change the future. But doing so will put Charlotte in the path of the murderer.…

Aprilynne Pike's bestselling Wings series was called "remarkable" by Stephenie Meyer, bestselling author of the Twilight Saga. And her most recent novel, Life After Theft, was cheered as a "whirlwind adventure" by School Library Journal. Now Aprilynne returns with this exhilarating departure from her previous novels. Sleep No More is a psychological thrill ride that is sure to keep readers' hearts racing until the very end.

Publication Date: April 29, 2014

Sleep No More had a strong beginning, but the ending kind of lost me. I liked the premise of the Oracles and how Charlotte has to decipher her visions to find a murderer. The serial killer scenes were so scary and the mystery may have been a little predictable, but it still had me eager to find out what would happen.

Charlotte is a loner, forced by her aunt to block out her psychic visions. Oracles aren’t supposed to change the future, but Charlotte finds this difficult to do when she sees her classmates being murdered. A mystery man named Smith contacts her and offers his help and they work together to save her classmates.

Charlotte was a good lead and I could sympathize with how hard it was to be ostracized by her classmates because of the cover story she used to hide her visions. I wish the secondary characters were a little more developed, especially Charlotte’s love interest Linden and her aunt Sierra.

The pacing was good, especially as Charlotte is thrown into horrific vision after vision of the murders. The details of the murders were gruesome and I could understand how horrified Charlotte was to see people close to her killed in such gory ways. The paranormal angle was interesting, especially as Charlotte experiments with her powers.

My issue was the end, so frustrating! There were random twists thrown in and I didn’t like the direction they took the story in. I also didn’t understand the killer’s motives at all once they were revealed. I was actually a little depressed after finishing the book because I wasn’t thrilled with the final outcome.

The conclusion seemed open ended, so I’m hoping this will become a series and some of the problems I had with the book would be worked out. I mostly enjoyed Sleep No More and would certainly read another book by the author.

Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of the novel for review!