Never To Sleep by Rachel Vincent

Never To Sleep (Soul Screamers, #5.5)

by Rachel Vincent


Don't Close Your Eyes.

Sophie Cavanaugh is not going to let her freak of a cousin's strange psychiatric condition ruin high school for them both. Not after all the work she's put into cultivating the right look, and friends, and reputation. But then, Sophie sees something so frightening she lets out a blood–curdling scream–and finds herself stuck in a bizarre parallel world where nothing is safe and deadly creatures lurk just out of sight, waiting for her to close her eyes and sleep…forever.

Could this world be real? Or does insanity run in the family…?

Reviewed by Linda on

4 of 5 stars

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Short, to the point, quite funny... but still from Sophie's POV...

In this novella, Sophie meets Luca, the necromancer, and a soulless reaper who makes her screem so hard she and Luca end up in the Netherworld. Most of the story is about how to get back to the real world, and it actually had loads of hilarious quotes :

"I don't even like regular plants. Except for corsages and long-stemmed roses." And htose only hurt you when they don't show up...

"You're not... human?" "Well, I am human. But I'm more."

Maybe Kaylee was actually the sanest person I knew.

"Okay, time out. That's all the crazy talk I can take for now. I want to go home. What do I have to do? Click my heels together?" My shoes weren't ruby, nor were they slippers, but for what my dad paid for the designer label, they damn well ought to take me wherever I wanted to go.

"I never joke about carnivorous bunnies."

"Aplologies, Your Highnexx, I meant to mistake you for someone who wants to survive."

In the end, my conscience won, but only because letting Luca die in the Netherworld would be an unacceptable waste of a perfectly good six-pack.

"I always knew popularity was a survival skill i high school, but here, it's really an issue of life and death."

I wanted the courage to face whaterver was coming to kill me, but who was I kidding? I didn't even have the guts to defent Laura - my own best friend - when Peyton started raggin on her, so what good would I be against an actual monster?

People called Kaylee special, but what they really meant was "special." In that straitjackets and padded walls kind of way. She wasn't special like Luca thought I was special. She could never handle what I'd just seen and done. She wasn't stable enough.


All right, then, Sophie - you really make me look forward to seeing how you'll react to just how special Kaylee is - and how you only have a tiny part of that family special-ness in you :D

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 1 January, 2012: Finished reading
  • 1 January, 2012: Reviewed