Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (3 stars)

An excellent premise: a contagious and fatal insomnia epidemic is sweeping the world. Sleep donors are sought desperately to save lives, and the most valuable sleep of all comes from newborn baby donors who are sedated to have their grade A dreamless sleep extracted.

But is there a risk to donating? What effects will it have on the most prolific and famous donor "Baby A"? Is the donated sleep contaminated? Is there a black market for sleep?

There's such a wealth of ideas here, it would be easy to hang a whole series of novels off them, but this is a novella so we need to settle for less. Sadly, while the writing is strong none of the tension in these ideas is really brought to climax. The novel ends with basically none of those interesting questions answered, and left me with a feeling that it could have been so much more.

I get the impression that this was a literary author "slumming it" in sci-fi for a bit with an interesting idea, but not one she wanted to spend a whole lot of time on. I'd love to read a China Meiville or Robin McKinley rewrite of this novel.

3 stars.