Starting this year, all you inhabitants of this miserable planet, be careful if you start suffering from insomnia; you could suddenly turn into an uncontrolled killing machine within a few years.
And this is precisely what happens to Melissa, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Insomnia, the debut novel by debut author Ludovica Cicala. With a past torn apart by so-called EVOs, beings belonging to a new evolution of the human race possessing supernatural powers, behind her, she lives under her mother's overprotective wings until, against her will, she is forced to leave her own life and immerse herself in the world of the same monsters that halved her family. Embarking on an adventure with some of them, she will realize that being different is not the same as being wrong.
Ludovica Cicala offers her readers a thick tome, a staggering five hundred pages long, fifty-five chapters promising adventure, mystery, and intrigue, all to be enjoyed with a dose of little mischief among the group of friends Melissa joins. From a plot like this, one expects action, strong twists, suspense, any element that, at least in the climax, will literally keep you on the edge of your seat, and instead…
Too many good intentions were swirling around in the author's head when she was drafting the first version of her novel, the ideal of equality, the desire to capture the humanity of the characters… All very interesting, but at this point, wouldn't it have been better to try her hand at a historical novel set in World War II, instead of trying to invent a dystopian future, one that's also very close to our own? The basic idea is good, intriguing, but it's not developed well. The characters are flat, stuck in their ways and forever stuck in their fears and torments. The only exception is Virginia, but she's not a major character. Melissa and Byron, the co-protagonist, are the most problematic and least believable characters. Melissa serves only to give the story focus, while Byron is the exact opposite. He's a sort of bad-boy Superman, one of those character stereotypes so popular these days in amateurish stories. He's the one who propels the story forward; without him, the other characters would likely have no choice but to mope around and wait to die, far from any form of civilization. This greatly weakens the plot, which is already less than excellent in terms of content. Regarding this last point, the most critical aspect is the lack of explanations behind each individual scientific process that led to this extremely rapid change in the human genome. The reasons behind the development of EVOs seem unknown to the author herself, who takes care to carefully describe the places and situations, but not the underlying why. Other plot holes concern the various sections that narrate the characters' various crushes. The romantic element is there, but it isn't explored in depth, and despite this, it manages to occupy too large a portion of the story, making it at times boring and not very functional to the plot itself.
As for the author's style, the author's is very fluid, light, and never overly verbose, although the entire work could use a complete overhaul, especially to completely remove vulgar language from the narrative and eliminate various phrases that are repeated over and over again throughout the chapters.
Insomnia is therefore one of those "all smoke and mirrors" novels that promises too much and ultimately proves stingy. All we can hope for is a sequel where all these dead ends are finally utilized and explained.