I'm a big fan of middle-grade horror books and this was a dark but enjoyable one. This book is set in 1986 and focuses on 11-year-old Ellie Dasher. Right off the bat, we're right in my pop culture sweet spot. Ellie moves to a new town, the ancestral home of her family, with her father. She is not a Sleepwalker and has never heard of a Sleepwaker, but she quickly begins to learn about a hidden world where sleep occurs that has been kept secret for years from the waking world. A place where Sleepwalkers keep children safe from nightmares. Ellie enters this world and goes on a dark and exciting adventure. The two different but parallel worlds brought to mind for me The Upside Down from Stranger Things. I found the story to be quite dark and scary at times and very creative. There were sections that were a bit slow for my taste, but overall, it was very unique.

Thank you to Netgally and Somnium Publishing LLC for providing me with a galley of this book.

What a different and unusual read!! I was very hesitant about requesting, this type of book is outside my genre. When I do reviews, I more so focus on HOW the book made me feel, as to what it was about. You can find any review on what a book is about, but not many on how it made you feel. I was happily surprised with what I read. This is a suspenseful book with a mixture of adventure, fantasy, and horror thrown in. This book has a dreamland environment. They were a moment where I was afraid of the book loosing it's way, but the author brought the book on track. My biggest disappointment is that the book ended on a cliffhanger. I have to be honest, if i knew that going in, I might have passed up reading it
Once I started reading, I didn't stop until I was finished. If you're looking for a unusual, but satisfying read, you owe it to yourself to give this a go.

#NETGALLEY #SLEEPWALKERS

This book was really enjoyable! I love spooky things and this book had fun bits of that. I liked the characters as well, even though I think they probably could have been a bit better. Overall it was a fun experience.

The level of absolute love that I have for this book will need to sit and simmer a bit more.

Let me just say that I have not truly savored a story as much as this one in quite a long time. The environments were so brilliantly described that I could clearly envision even the most alien of terrains.

When a young girl and her family move into the home that her grandmother willed to her and her brother, strange things begin to occur. The Old asleep, as the house is called, has been a local eyesore and source of ghost stories for years. When Ellie discovers a whole new version of her world when she falls asleep, pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place somewhere between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness.

A full 4.8/5 which is almost as close to perfect as I will ever admit.

Ellie and her family move to their ancestral home. She immediately meets a ghost, but he’s nice and wants her to help him figure out who he is. No one else has seen him in a very long time. She finds out about sleepwalkers, and even though she’s not one, she’s plagued by dark creatures of the dreamworld. When one takes her brother, she’ll risk everything to travel to the unkown and get him back.

This appropriately creepy middle-grade paranormal adventure was a lot of fun. Moving to a new (haunted) place, slowly discovering her family’s past. Losing her brother to some supernatural being and being determined to get him back. Ellie wasn’t always the most loveable character, but I was rooting for her. None of these things are normal, and it’s hard starting over in a new place and losing the only person who knows your family and your life like you do. I liked her journey of making friends and traveling through mysterious dreamworlds.

It wrapped up enough to end this book but definitely left things open to jump right into another book. There are elements of proper, adult horror but adjusted down to the middle grade level flawlessly. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can’t wait to continue the adventure, and I recommend it for middle graders and adults alike.

It’s out now wherever you get your books.

I'm not quite sure what I expected from Sleepwalkers, but what Round One gave me wasn't it. That's not a bad thing exactly, but it caught me off guard. Somehow I expected the entire thing to be spookier than it was. It tells the tale of a young girl named Ellie whose brother falls into a coma that sends her on a wild adventure through a new world to wake him up. I liked Ellie and I'm interested to see if there is a sequel written about her after the abrupt and surprising end of this book. I liked all the characters and I liked the idea of sleepwalkers. However, I feel like nothing was quite fleshed out enough for me to really see the whole picture. Things that were brought up in the beginning were forgotten until the very end when suddenly they were all that mattered, except we had forgotten them so the impact was not what was hoped for. Overall I liked this book and would be interested in knowing what happens next to the characters, but I'm not completely invested.

There is such an interesting premise to this book, but somewhere in the telling, it got bogged down. This was a DNF for me about 30% through. The world-building was imaginative and it certainly contained some fun spooky bits, but it got stuck where the dialogue was concerned and progressing the plot. I hate giving anything a one-star but this one just wasn't for me.

Solid dark middle-grade book, I really enjoyed Round One of the series and think a younger reader will too. Personally, wish it was spookier but for the target audience, I think it's the perfect amount of spooky and I still was able to enjoy it. Definitely something I'll be recommending.

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for allowing me to read Sleepwalkers by Izzi Breigh. I loved this book! I know it was meant for middle school readers but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was mystery and friendship. Family and the strength of a sibling bond. There were scarey parts that would have had me turning on all the lights when I was a kid. I am bummed that I can't buy the book for my childrens book collection, but I will be getting it on my Kindle.

This was such an imaginative and very age relevant book! I think kids will really get a kick out of it. There's really interesting world building, excellent characters, and so many twists and turns. If you have a middle grader who loves fantasy, I recommend checking this one out!

Izzi Breigh, raised by a family of peacocks, grew up on a rutabaga farm. She now resides in a small cottage made entirely of pinecones. Izzi enjoys knitting shirts for starfish, rooms without corners, and peddling time. Her day job is filling hourglasses with precisely the right amount of sand, which she sells for 2 copper pennies every Saturday at her local flea market. Hide and seek is her favorite sport and though she has repeatedly spotted Waldo, she has yet to figure out where in the world Carmen Sandiego is. Her newest book is Sleepwalkers: Round One, a dark middle-grade book that will thrill readers young and old alike.

Sleepwalkers focuses on 11-year-old Ellie Dasher. Her father has inherited the family house, Old Sleep, and has moved the family in. The only problem they face is the constant accumulation dust. Still, as the new kids in school, Ellie and her brother have to struggle with making new friends, meeting new people, keeping new schedules. However, one of Ellie’s new friends just happens to be a ghost that haunts Old Sleep. Then, when she and her brother are attacked, and her brother goes into a coma, it’s up to Ellie, Ghost, and the Sleepwalkers to save the day.

What makes Sleepwalkers so interesting are the various genres that Breigh dances through. It starts out as a typical haunted house narrative, more or less, but then shifts quickly to alternate/dream universe narrative. This takes a bit of time to set up in the opening chapters, and the shifts aren’t as easy or seamless as some readers would expect, especially in an YA book. However, once the narrative gets going and readers know what to expect, the book evens out and the scary fun begins.

There’s a lot of imagination in Sleepwalkers, and it’s a promising start to a new series. There’s a lot that middle-grade readers will connect with, and the plot lines tap into some primal fears that most people have, like nightmares and fear of the dark, but in a way that’s not too over the top as to repel the target audience. Furthermore, there’s enough her that will keep adult readers engaged and interested, so anyone looking for a solid, YA horror novel with some clever takes on classic tropes should check out Sleepwalkers: Round One by Izzi Breigh.

I had to dnf this one. The dialogue between the parents and the use of pet names every other sentence because overwhelmingly repetitive and irritating. Honestly I really was not enjoying how the story was flowing and it wasn’t clear what was going on, but the overuse of pet names was the final straw for me. I feel the synopsis did a great job at getting you excited for what the book was supposed to be about but the beginning chapters need some serious edits so the reader actually wants to continue the story.

I have year a lot of wonderful middle grade books at this point and honestly this seems to dumb down the characters and the reader which I didn’t appreciate.

I can't say enough positive things about this book! I cannot wait to read more of Izzi's work and I hope this series goes on and on forever. It was everything I want in a MG book like this. BRAVO!

The first in a J-fiction fantasy series. What started as a haunted house mystery evolved into an alternate universe adventure. Lots of action and plenty of unanswered questions will keep young readers invested enough to follow the series.

Wow. This is a really interesting and frightening book. There is a real world out there when kids go to sleep. There are some great wonderful things out there and some really frightening things out. Who can you trust? How do you fix something that you don’t even know about until your little brother slips into a coma?

Imaginative, frightening, and fantastic! I love the idea of the other realm of consciousness, and the mysteries, fantasy and middle grade level of horror made this a spooky and fun read. I really liked the friendships among Ellie and the other characters, as well as the hierarchical society of Inzien. It was a bit difficult to get into the book at first, but after reviewing the author's website, I think there is a level of eccentricity and quirkiness that the reader must embrace in order to really get this novel.

This would be a great read for sci-fi/fantasy fans as well as fans of scary stories. There are still loose ends I want to see cleared up and the story ends on a cliffhanger, which is not my favorite usually. I think overall I'm sucked into the story too deep to quit, so I'll have to read the next one when it comes out!

This was a really cool Inception meets Stranger Things vibe, but with an appropriate read for 3rd-6th graders. I will say, I selfishly wish this was a YA Fantasy world so I could experience it in my preferred genre. I truly enjoyed the bold main character. Some may say she's unlikeable -- I'd say she knows her boundaries and that's some great life skills for a ten-year-old. She's definitely an underrepresented type of character: someone who doesn't need the world to like them and genuinely enjoys their own company.

While there were a few moments that felt convenient or like I just had to accept something as true, the world is really well-developed and you can tell there's been a lot of work put into building it. The mysteries are sprinkled throughout to create great ah-ha moments when the answers are finally revealed! There were times the pacing slowed down a little but the build-up to the end was very intense and leaves you in a wild place to set up the next book! Overall, unexpected and super fun read :)