Where Sleeping Girls Lie is Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s second novel, after her debut Ace of Spades. I have pretty much gravitated away from YA novels, but I decided to give Àbíké-Íyímídé’s second novel a chance because I liked Ace of Spades and I appreciate that her YA fiction is grounded in realism. Unfortunately, I was not as engrossed by Where Sleeping Girls Lie as I was by Ace of Spades. I feel as though this novel is lacking something, and after pondering over it, I have concluded that it is because the characters are somewhat bland.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is set in England and is about a teenage girl named Sade Hussein who becomes orphaned after her father dies. She inherits his very wealthy estate and enrols in a prestigious boarding school called Alfred Nobel Academy after being homeschooled her whole life. After Sade’s first night at ANA, her roommate, Elizabeth Wang, goes missing, but no one really seems to care because Elizabeth was a scholarship student with not many friends. Weirdly, the other students seem to think that Sade had something to do with her disappearance, so Sade decides to help Elizabeth’s best friend, Baz, investigate. During her investigation into Elizabeth’s disappearance, Sade uncovers all kinds of secrets at ANA, including the boys’ extracurricular activities in sexual assault.

The novel is told through Sade’s perspective, but she keeps many things close to her chest, not just from the other characters but from the reader as well, which has the effect of giving her not much of a personality, unless “quiet vengeance” is a personality type. Hints are dropped throughout the novel about Sade’s past, and as I put them together and realized what Sade’s true motivations were, I finally started to appreciate her character, but until that point, I just did not really care for what was going on in the story. Sade, who is a beautiful girl, attracts the attention of a couple of boys at school, and I think the only thing that really surprised me about this novel is that she keeps herself arm’s length from them and even tells them off, instead of becoming giddy over a boy, or a girl for that matter, after being kept separated from her peer group prior to enrolling at ANA.

Sade also becomes sort-of friends with the girls known at ANA as the “Unholy Trinity”, but aside from being kind of bitchy and cold, I could not understand why they were considered “unholy”. They do not torment the student body; they actually do not do much in the novel despite the important role that they play in Elizabeth’s disappearance. The only character in the novel who seems fully developed is Baz, the perfect sidekick who gets to express all kinds of emotions.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is definitely a slow burn of a novel that does not get interesting until it gets closer to the end, when it really starts to delve into the toxic masculinity of educational institutions and leniency on sexual assault (at one point, I was reminded of Brock Turner, which made me see red). Still, I found it to be somewhat of a disappointing second novel. I think fans of Àbíké-Íyímídé and the YA genre will enjoy it, but I am not really inspired to read any more of her novels after this.