Sing Me to Sleep is the story of Saoirse Sorkova, a teenage siren who lives a secret existence in the kingdom of Keirdre, which is cut off from the outside world by a magical barrier enacted by the king. Sirens are feared for their blood lust and mind control powers, and the king hates non-fae creatures in general, so Saoirse has spent the last several years pretending to be a normal fae who lacks an elemental affinity and training to one day become a soldier or enforcer (whatever pays the most). She also indulges her blood lust on the side, and for the last several months she's been working for an assassination organization called the Raze, which basically carries out the petty grudges of the nobility against each other. When she graduates her Delta training at the top of her class, she's offered a position among the fae prince's personal guard. And when she accepts, she begins to run into trouble as the royal family start to investigate the murders that she's been committing on behalf of the Raze. At the same time, she's trying to unravel the mystery of who's blackmailing her and threatening her adopted younger sister.
And there's a prince, so obviously she's going to start falling for the prince. You saw that coming, right?
The thing about this book is that it is extremely YA. That is not a value judgment on the quality of the writing. (I am saving the judgments on the quality of the writing for later in the review). It just means that this book is packed with YA tropes, and if you don't like reading very traditional, tropey YA, you probably won't like this book.
For a brief run-down of what I mean with the YA tropes:
- Saoirse has a sweet and innocent twelve-year-old sister who she would do anything to protect, even killing people for money.
- Saoirse's adoptive parents run a mill, but the royal family prevents them from charging a reasonable price for their product, so they rely on the money that Saoirse makes from being a serial killer/assassin, even though they don't approve of her being a serial killer/assassin.
- Saoirse has secret, forbidden magic, and to make things worse, her secret, forbidden magic is because she's a secret, forbidden creature.
- And as a bonus: Before we ever meet her, Saoirse has already trained and become a super competent warrior, and she's really good with crossbows, apparently.
Are these things bad? No. They're just tropes. But for me personally, these tropes don't tend to bode well. I enjoy a lot of YA books, but the YA books I usually enjoy aren't the ones that utilize this combination of tropes, and Sing Me to Sleep wasn't an exception to this.
I had a mixed reading experience with this book. On the one hand, I was entertained enough to keep reading. On the other hand, some of my entertainment was coming from rolling my eyes at the book, not rolling my eyes...with the book. You know? We started off with tropes I don't really enjoy, and then Saoirse began making bad decisions at a truly impressive rate. I guessed one twist, but there were a few others thrown in that felt a little silly.
The very end was good. The very end intrigued me for the sequel more than anything that preceded it, to be honest.
But even with the ending being intriguing, this only nets a 3/5 with me. There was potential here, but it didn't land for me, and I think the execution being what it is always would have hindered my enjoyment.
To sum it all up, I can excuse serial killing, but I can't excuse being BAD at serial killing and getting away with it because everyone around you is even worse at investigating murders.
That's the spoiler-free review. Now it's time to get nitty-gritty and devolve into disorganized ranting.
When I said Saoirse makes an impressive number of bad decisions, I wasn't joking. She makes tons of bad decisions. She's a serial assassin who's terrible at hiding her tracks, despite the fact that she supposedly got trained to investigate crimes during her off-screen Delta training. This isn't necessarily an outright writing flaw, since you could argue that her blood lust and her desire to flaunt her power gets the better of her common sense, but we're also supposed to think that Saoirse is smart and competent, so I had quite a few giggles while reading.
She also uses her siren powers to seduce someone who's investigating the murders she's been committing and then is SHOCKED and APPALLED when he tells the king that he was approached by someone who tried to seduce him and get information.
Since I wasn't super invested in the story, a lot of nitpicky worldbuilding stuff stuck out to me in this book, but my favorite weird thing about the worldbuilding is probably the fact that sexism only seems to exist when it's relevant to the plot. 90% of the time, no one seems to care about gender, but when the murders and the Raze are brought up, we need to constantly be reminded that the Raze (the assassin group) DON'T hire women, so a woman could NEVER have done the murders! Honestly, the sexism in this book seemed like it was only there to make the king seem like more of a jerk and to give the characters less reason to connect Saoirse with the murders.
Speaking of Saoirse, I felt like she was constantly discovering things that felt like they should be fairly common knowledge? That, or if the information she's finding out is being suppressed, she seemed to find out about it way too easily. She's being blackmailed by someone mysterious, and most of the time all they want her to do is research the king's past atrocities, like how he wiped out all of the giants, dryads, sirens, etc. that were once inside the magic barrier.
But like, shouldn't she know that? She's a siren who's had to hide for her entire life because of what she is. I was really confused when this information surprised her at all. I think the fact that there were once other creatures within the barrier besides fae, witches, humans, and sirens is supposed to be the twist, but it just wasn't very twisty to me. It seemed like a logical next step.
And going back to the blackmail, I guessed who put the letter into Rain's bag when I was less than halfway through the book, because I'm familiar with the tropes at hand and I thought about it for 15 seconds. Saoirse's one friend is Carrick, the guy who's been stuck guarding the dormitories while she was training. He's the one who brought Rain to graduation, which is where the letter showed up. She got really mad at him, but she never considers that he might have put the letter in her bag.
So like, obviously he put the letter in her bag. He also turns out to be the assassin that the Raze have been crediting Saoirse's kills to since he stopped working for them. Except no, they haven't, because one of the twists is that Saoirse is not employed by the Raze, but by one (or two, kind of?) of her fellow guards, who are allied with the resistance. I think this book does err a little on the bad side of every mysterious figure having kind of an obvious identity, and this twist is a great example of that. Carrick, being the assassin with a silly name is an interesting twist. Two of her co-workers ALSO having twist identities and affiliations cheapens the effect somewhat.
Also, I might as well say it. I'm lowkey rooting for Carrick to be endgame, not Hayes. For one thing, his name is cooler. For another, I like him more. And finally, Hayes started throwing up a couple of red flags near the end of the book and I'm wondering if he's going to become an antagonist in the future.
For more context, since this is all disorganized spoilers anyway, Hayes is a very traditional kind of YA love interest where he is a prince with a Bad Dad, and if only his bad dad could be neutralized, he would definitely be a better and more equitable ruler than that guy. Maybe monarchies are good if the people involved are good, y'know? But what this book does with Hayes that started to really intrigue me is that right at the end, after he becomes king, he doubles down on the same unjust laws that his father also enforced. He threatens his enforcers, says that someone of non-royal blood sitting on the throne would be treason, and justifies it to Saoirse by telling her that change has to be gradual. Suuure, Hayes. Sure. I also enjoyed how he told her that he forgives her for all the murdering she's done (which includes his best friend BTW) but only because if he thinks about it, he'll hate her. There's something here, and I'm hoping it's an interesting protagonist/antagonist dynamic and not a weird, unhealthy blossoming romance.
Oh, and this book made me wait 400 pages to discover the mystery of what Rain actually is, only for her to apparently just be a normal human? And all of the references Saoirse made to needing money for Rain's special requirements, that just meant bribe money so that Rain won't have to do P.E. at her fancy school? Bad twist. It actually could have clarified the stakes if we had just Known Rain Was Human the whole time.
I think this book was at its best when it was exploring the psychology of Saoirse as someone who doesn't feel remorse for killing, but knows she should feel remorse, and as someone who knows that she's monstrous, but wants to be loved anyway. It frequently lost me in execution of that concept, but I appreciated the effort that was made, and I think there are some interesting things here. If you can brave the utter YA-ness of this one, and if you aren't easily distracted by worldbuilding and developmental editing questions like I am, you might really like this book.
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