Series: Stand alone novel
Genre: YA Fantasy
Pages: 342
Time To Read: 3 hours 26 minutes
My Rating: 0.5 stars
Why I picked It Up
I picked this book up because it was one I received from my OwlCrate subscription box. It was beautiful and the premise of a Snow White retelling was intriguing.
Synopsis
This is a story that follows Eve, a princess that was raised for a singular purpose: to kill ‘The Knight,’ the kingdom’s evil sorcerer, who grants bargains to those who can find him, but never in the way they expect.
Unlike most people, Eve possesses a rare magic that allows her to conjure weapons from nature.
As she approaches her seventeenth birthday, Eve’s mother, Queen Regina, starts acting strange. She spends long hours talking to the magic mirror in her room and shutting Eve out, despite the two having always been close.
When the Knight’s self-proclaimed messenger arrives with a shocking revelation about Eve’s past, she starts to doubt everything she’s ever been told.
My Thoughts (Spoilers…duh)
Please, for the love of my sanity and yours do not read this book.
I was bored. Intensely, painfully bored. From beginning to end, Sleep Like Death felt like a complete waste of time, and the only reason I finished it was so I could count it towards my yearly reading goal and be done with it forever.
The biggest issue is that this book desperately wants to be emotional without doing any of the work required to earn those emotions. Eve is hit with one supposedly serious revelation or traumatic event after another. Her mother’s secret deals with the Knight, Nova‘s identity, faking her own death, an assassination attempt, her mother’s mental decline, a sudden romance, and even a major character death. On paper, these are heavy moments. In execution, they land with absolutely no impact because the story never gives us enough time to know the characters or care about them.
I felt nothing. No shock. No heartbreak. No tension. Just a vague sense of “Okay, what’s next?“
Part of the problem is expectations. I went in, hoping for a fun Snow White retelling. What I got instead was a messy mashup of Snow White, Howl‘s Moving Castle, and some vaguely Rumpelstiltskin-adjacent nonsense that never coheres into a single, confident story. It feels like too many ideas fighting for space in a book that didn’t have the room, or the editing, to support them.
The characters didn’t help. I did not care about Eve at all. She’s impulsive to the point of stupidity, and not in a way that feels intentional or compelling. Nova somehow manages to be both important and completely under developed. We’re told who he is, then suddenly we’re told there’s a romance, then I was left wondering when I was supposed to start believing or caring about that. The emotional beats are announced, not built.
The pacing is frantic and unfocused, which makes everything worse. The story rushes through moments that should have been given space to breathe, reflect, and hurt. Instead, it barrels forward so quickly that the only motivation I had left was finishing the book so I could be done with it.
As for themes, this book said nothing meaningful to me beyond demonstrating the stark difference between a well-edited novel and one that desperately needed more structural work. The ending was predictable, unsatisfying, and capped off by an utterly baffling appearance of storytelling sisters who show up out of nowhere to dump exposition for 15 pages…only for it to not matter at all.
TL;DR: This book tried to do too much, said nothing of substance, and failed to make me care about a single character or outcome.
Who Would Enjoy This?
If you enjoy fast-moving fantasy with constant plot developments and don’t mind being told rather than shown many of the emotional beats, this may work better for you than it did for me.
Bookish Extras
Final Thoughts
Overall, Sleep Like Death was a big disappointment early in the year. I loved the concept, adored the OwlCrate edition, and genuinely wanted this to become a new favorite. Instead, it ended up being a story that never gave me a reason to care about its characters or emotional stakes. Beautiful on the outside, unfortunately not on the inside.