Sleep Donation

Russell's prose made this short read very successful. She delivers on the dystopian premise, and the clever turns of phrase made Trish's story compelling and vivid. The story starts with a pandemic similar to the one we're currently in, except its one of insomnia. Something goes wonky in our brain chemistry, causing mass sleeplessness, and technology is barely able to keep up with it. I thought that the story was wonderfully told, and I got hints of more complicated characters that could have been stretched out into a novel. I liked that Trish's voice permeated the story, and listening to her use her sister Dory to get more donations was always compelling. Another thing the story does really well is set up one problem, solve it, and then begins another. Baby A donates unpolluted sleep to the masses, and Donor Y corrupts the progress. Trish's character arc revolves around her crisis of conscience around donors and her sketchy managers. By the end, she's left with some interesting introspection regarding what she's done and where she's been. She's put into a lot of compromising moral dilemmas in the book and I think that's where the story shines the brightest. My issues with the book revolve around the way that the author ties things up. The brothers creating secondhand sleep donations is an arc that doesn't get the complicated light that it should have. Its an arc that ends abruptly because Trish quits. Her narrative glosses over the ensuing scandal, but because I liked Russell's writing so much, I felt that she could have elaborated more on it. I was compelled by the cast's orbit around Trish, but I thought that the Harkonnens stole the spotlight that could have been shared more with Jeremy and the brothers.