In this episode, Ruqayyah lets her inner fangirl out as she reviews the book Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough. Find out what she thinks.
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Well, hello there. Welcome back to another episode of Reading with R. Another month, another episode. It’s your girl Ruqayyah over here. So, for our new listeners, you’re welcome, welcome, welcome. Reading with R is a review show where we review a book that we like. Ugh, at this point, I feel like I need to stop saying review, more of fangirl really. That’s all I do with these books every month. So I’m Ruqayyah and I fangirl over books, once a month, every month, inshaallah.
So at the end of each episode, I give three books where you get to choose the one that you want. Just send over the title to my email, ruqayyahnabage@gmail.com. Make sure you spell it the same way the title of the podcast is spelt. Oh, not the title of the podcast. Sorry. My name underneath the title of the podcast. R U Q A Y Y A H, ruqayyahnabage@gmail.com or, even easier, send it over to my Twitter handle @anchoredbywords. Okay, so let’s jump into it. This month, we’re reviewing, drumroll please, Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough.
Okay! Okay! Okay! I have to give a very big warning at the start of this episode. This book is a psychological thriller people, and I kid you not, you will feel as if you are going crazy at the same time as the heroine. This woman is crazy talented. Yeah, she is very, very talented. A book of hers that I have read before is “Behind Her Eyes”. In fact, Behind Her Eyes is being turned into a TV show. So Insomnia is her new book. It was recommended to me by a friend of mine. Shoutout to Umaymah. She inspired this and I finished the book in less than two days, I think. It was so crazy. Like the title, leads you to believe the book is about this lady that has insomnia and she starts going completely cuckoo
It’s a psychological thriller, yeah. So obviously the grip of it is the weight, the anticipation, while reading, where you’re doubting everything. And, one of the best things I find about psychological thrillers are unreliable narrators. Yeah, mostly because it’s the main character who is the one that is going crazy or who is the one that the things are happening to, is the one that is narrating the story.
So you have this skewed narrative where just, you don’t even know if what you’re reading is real, if it’s what is actually happening. So the fact that you know that the book you’re reading is a psychological thriller, you will have that going on in your mind when you are reading. Even if the author does nothing to assert that view or opinion. So it’s this woman that has her husband and her kids and her mom before she went crazy before her 40th birthday. She had insomnia. The lady also gets insomnia some weeks before her 40th birthday, and she just starts panicking that she’s going to go crazy like her mom. What her mom did when she turned crazy was this big mystery that we’ll find out along the way when you read the book, because, you know, even though I am fine going over the book, you should still give it a read.
Unravelling
We basically have a front row seat to the unravelling of her mind. The becoming of her madness through insomnia. I know scientists really hammer on the fact that we need to sleep well. And in this generation we tend to not give it that much importance, you know, living the night, our life still waking up early to make it to our jobs. So on a slightly more serious note, please get some sleep loves. Get some sleep, and if you can’t sleep, see a doctor. Sleep is important, have healthy, sleeping schedules and in order not to be a hypocrite inshaallah I’ll try and clean up my own sleep schedule. So yeah, on that note sleep well, please do. Not sleeping can lead to a lot of things, not just madness or something like that.
Back to the book. Our heroine is scared of going crazy, like her own mother did when she turned 40 years old. So we go through how her own mom went crazy through flashbacks, what she did to her and her sister. And then as we are witnessing the effect of the insomnia on her own mind, we keep getting flashbacks as to how that same insomnia ruined her mother’s life. She goes, does research and basically, strange things start happening around her. She loses fractions of time because she falls asleep in the most random of places, at work, sitting in her car, outside the supermarket. So she can’t really trust herself because after she comes out of that reverie after losing that time, she can’t recall what has happened.
So things happen. She doesn’t even know if it’s her doing those things. Her husband starts to accuse her. Her marriage starts failing. Interestingly enough, there’s a dynamic in that book that I don’t see a lot. Her and her husband, she’s a lawyer, her husband is the stay at home dad. You know, I don’t think I’ve even seen any of that in any book. So they have issues in their marriage. Things start unravelling. She finds out her daughter is having an affair with this really old dude. And it’s just crazy. Then her son also starts getting nightmares. It is crazy, and of course, you will never see the end coming. You will never see the end coming.
Sarah Pinborough, that woman is amazing. She is crazy talented. She is crazy, crazy talented. She’ll have you glued to your seats. To the edge of your seats. In fact, till the end of the book. On that note, I will leave you with a reminder to go and read her other book Behind Her Eyes or watch the series if you are not a reader, and you just want to come hear me fangirl about books instead of reading the books by yourself. So again, I remind you that you can listen to Reading With R and other Ayamba LitCast podcasts on Red Circle, the Ayamba LitCast website or any of your favourite podcast streaming apps – iTunes, Spotify, Audible, you will find us there, in your speakers, every month, inshaallah.
Next Month’s Book
Now, our picks for next month. As promised in the last episode, all our picks are going to be Colleen Hoover novels because that woman deserves to be stand, and she’s amazing period. Argue with your keyboard or your phone speaker in this case.
So, our picks are,
- Slammed by Colleen Hoover. Her very first book. Her debut novel.
- Confess by Colleen Hoover and
- November 9 by Colleen Hoover.
Oh my God, I feel like adding just one more.
- It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, because it’s such a big book at this time in the Bookstagram – BookTok space.
So, send me your picks. Send your picks into my Twitter DM @anchoredbywords. No space, no underscores, no full stops. Or, send them to my email, ruqayyahnabage@gmail.com. R U Q A Y Y A H. I can’t wait to see your picks and your thoughts. Have an amazing day people.
Bye.
