Review: Insominia by J.R. Johanson

Insomnia by J.R. Johanson
Publisher: Flux
Release Date: June 8, 2013

Her eyes saved his life.
Her dreams released his darkness.

After four years of sleeplessness, high school junior Parker Chipp can't take much more. Every night, instead of sleeping, he enters the dreams of the last person he's made eye contact with. If he doesn't sleep soon, Parker will die.

Then he meets Mia. Her dreams, calm and beautifully uncomplicated, allow him blissful rest that is utterly addictive. But what starts out as a chance meeting turns into an obsession; Parker's furious desire for what he needs pushes him to extremes he never thought he'd go. And when someone begins to terrorizing Mia with twisted death threats, Parker's memory blackouts leave him doubting his own innocence

My Thoughts:
THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS YOU ARE WARNED!!

This book made no sense whatsoever.  I am beyond frustrated because the summary sounded so good, but what I read was not what I was promised.   I very rarely give out 1 snowflakes and when I do I am not very happy about it at all.  I can always find something in a book that makes me like it, but with Insomnia I can't find anything unfortunately.

I am going to limit this review because I don't want to get too ranty so I am going to discuss the major problems I had with this story.  The first being how unorganized the story was.  In the beginning Parker just wants to sleep without falling into a persons dreams and when he finds this peace in Mia he becomes addicted to her.  Okay I get that she gave him peace, but instead of stalking the poor girl why didn't he try and become her friend?  He didn't have to tell her about the whole Watcher thing he had going on, but he could have acted like a normal person and just bonded with her.  It wouldn't have been that hard for him either, she was Addie's (his best friends sister) best friend and she played soccer which is something they both had in common.  It seemed so unnecessary for Parker to become this weird psycho stalker.  Plus why didn't Mia go to the police??  She had evidence that she was being stalked!  I was really frustrated by these events.

That was one part that didn't feel real or organized, the other bigger part was the whole Darkness vs whodunit vs Skull Bones guy.  All three of these are thrown into a story that was so inconsistent that I never knew what was going on.  The Darkness is the part of Parker that is trying to take over his body I'm guessing anyway.  When Parker would fall asleep this Darkness would take over and do weird things like watch Mia sleep at night.  What I don't get is A.how can someone black out if their brain can't sleep which is Parkers big issue in this book and B.In the end we are shown who the villain is and since it wasn't actually Parker I don't get what role this Darkness plays. Yes this thing did influence Parker to kill a person in a dream that so happened to actually kill them in real life, but the the author chose to move focus from this thing to something else entirely making me feel like this whole Darkness stuff wasn't that important. I simply just don't get it.

The villain is another area where I am completely lost. I don't understand why this character was ever brought in to be the big bad guy and all it did in my opinion was bring in another strange disconnected storyline. If the bad guy had turned out to be Parker and his dark side then I at least would have understood where the story was going, but this random person did not help the story at all.

The introduction of the Skull Bones guy was really not good timing and it felt like to me as a reader as a cheap way to try and make me read the sequel.  This piece of information should have been brought in way sooner than the last page and honestly it was more interesting than the other 300 pages that I did read.

Okay so that was a long rant sorry about but well I just don't get it!  I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn't and I feel very disappointed. 

1 snowflake