Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. I have attempted it on a number of occasions but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get into it.

The description of this book really intrigued me. It's a complex plot but is a very compelling read, and I was satisfied with the ending.

The characters are well formed and I really liked the protagonist. The second half was better than the first, with lots of twists and more pace.

Overall, a great read.

I had high hopes for this book, from the quirky title to the unusual blurb, but it just didn't hook me. I couldn't finish it after trying multiple times. I'm also not sure if the eARC I got was weirdly formatted, or if that's just the book. Either way, it was difficult to read and not gripping.

I think you resonate with the way the book is written or not. For me it was too stilted and unnerving to really have enjoyed it.

I found the overall plot reminded me of Room as the main character experiences the outside world for the first time but I really could not connect to the characters. I also found some of the writing meandering and the story did not keep my attention throughout.

I can clearly see the author has talent and will watch out for her next book.

If I ever took a steam train through a book, this is it.
This is the story of 17-year old Anna who lives with her junkie Dad holed up in a high-rise flat full of hoarded rubbish. At the first few pages, I thought this one’s not for me, the prose feeling like I literally had to wade through piles of stuff to even get through the front door of the book, but then....read the whole book in one sitting - insomnia indeed :)
When her Dad dies and she finally leaves the confines of their flat, she is rescued by Lucky and taken to his family, his recluse wife and his 13-year-old son Tick. The sensory onslaught from the world outside is complete. Anna’s thoughts and her conversations with Tick are beautifully poetic. Like roses growing from the cracks in a concrete jungle of a grim, dystopian world. When Tick kisses her, “She was somewhere where there were no walls and no doors and the world was folded into a paper plane that glided along the grey green sky.”

Anna has lived a sheltered, isolated life in the chaos-strewn, delusionary world of the flat that she shares with her hoarder father who has spent twelve years creating the Insomnia Museum from junk and drugs and depression. In those twelve years Anna has never been outside its walls, watching and re-watching the Wizard of Oz (but never the end) and waiting for Dad to return from his periodic disappearances to the outside world or into the disorder of his own head. Then one day he doesn’t wait up and Anna must reconnect with a world she barely remembers. She finds herself as Dorothy, lost in an Oz much darker than the one on her television.

Though loved by her father she has also been severely neglected in the name of “protection”, she is ignorThe Insomnia Musuem is a difficult novel to read for many reasons. It searches into painful topics of loss and guilt and responsibility and the consequences of both bad individual decisions and a social order that drastically limits the choices of those on the fringes, the poor, the uneducated, the addicts and the mentally-ill.

She is rescued by Lucky, a damaged man whose sadness and determination to sacrifice himself to the needs of others has alienated his teenage son and bedridden wife. The council estate where they live and where Anna begins to learn about the world is full of damaged people whom she struggles to understand but her innocence and her un-blinkered eyes give a poignant view of the everyday and extraordinary joys and tragedies of life.

The writing style is unusual, a disjointed stream-of-consciousness constructed by the undeveloped and confused mind of a child and it can take an effort to pick Anna meaning out of her words. She is so unfamiliar with the people and things around her that her confusion infects the reader. The remedy to her other-worldly innocence is the very earthbound anger and frustration of Trick, Lucky’s son, caught in a maelstrom of his own confusion and with no real outlet for his emotion. He is the archetype of the council estate teenager, lost, frustrated and let down by those around him. Their relationship is a touching one and offers a little hope against the grim reality of deprivation. It’s a sad story shot through with unusual passages of beauty and insight and is worth the effort.

I enjoyed this book to start with but the broken sentences become wearing after the first hundred pages. I gave up and found myself skipping through to the end. This something I have never done before but it felt like it would be a relentlessly dark and I was not in the right frame of mind to continue. Having said that I do think that others will find this book a challenging but good read. I would recommend it even though I could not finish it myself.

An unusual and challenging read. Anna lives on an abandoned estate, enclosed by her addict father in the 'Insomnia Museum', a collection of junk which fills their living space. Only upon her father's death can she step into the outdoors, where she discovers the harshness of the world outside and the drugs economy around which the estate revolves. The other characters encountered by Anna, Lucky who rescues her from her father, and Tick his son, are well developed and intriguing in their own rights. The stilted and staccato language with which the narrative is built can be tricky to read, but does add to the intense atmosphere of the story.

The Insomnia Museum is a highly original book. The cut-up, short, sentences take some getting used to but they really bring the writing to life. Seventeen year old Anna cannot remember having been outside. Her dad has decided that the outside world is not safe for her. The eventual reveal of why transforms our understanding of the harrowing world which our characters inhabit.
Anna's father is a junkie, and her mother has abandoned the family long ago. When Anna eventually gets outside we understand why she has been kept in for so long. Through her eyes we are shown a terrifying dystopia of seemingly mile high-tower blocks like the housing projects in The Wire.
Anna is taken in by a mysterious Samaritan called Lucky, who is single-handedly trying to right all the wrongs of their community. He should be taking more care of his own family but he is doing penance for his sins of the past. A man in a silver car controls the black economy, using the local children.
Although the world of the towers is compelling, you long for Anna to escape to a nicer neighbourhood and have a nice bath. The writing is so vivid, you can smell all the dirty clothes, and see the black mould on the walls.