Abandoned by Booklikes

Melissa (or Mel to her friends and family) a 14 year old girl wakes up and finds her entire town in South Dakota has gone to sleep and died. Trying to figure out what is going on while also realizing that because of her schizophrenia she could just be hallucinating everything, has Mel walking a tightrope through the whole book.

I found this to be an interesting short read. I doubt I would read further books in this series though because besides the main character having schizophrenia, I just wasn't really invested while reading this book.

I think the big issue was just that Mel as a character and the other secondary characters we eventually do meet just don't feel developed. If this had been longer maybe we could have things set up a bit better. Ms. Brozek going straight to several people we never hear from again who fall asleep and died (and seriously that is how the beginning starts) and jumping right into Melissa and her house arrest just didn't work. Maybe it would have been better to have a normal day with Melissa, her sister, and her sister's husband and a backstory on the whole family. Because we kept getting tidbits about what happened to make Melissa be sentenced to house arrest and we don't find out everything that she did until almost the very end. Getting info dumped through the whole book about Melissa and everything else she had to deal with was not a great way to play this since it was such a short read.

The writing was okay, but honestly things were repetitive and having Melissa as our first person narrator after a while was a bit much. Ms. Brozek has her talking in a stream of consciousnesses way and I wanted to tell her to take a breath.

The flow was okay, though things started to lag here and there after we find out what Mel is up against.

I thought having this whole book take place in a small town in South Dakota was a cool idea. Because of the circumstances of how people died in their sleep there is a lot of descriptions of how Mel comes across people she knows or now knew and the smell and the decay of people's bodies.

The ending I thought wrapped things up nicely, but since this is a trilogy, it seems that I was wrong about that.