The girl watched her too, a strange expression slowly creeping onto her face as she stared at Sade. It was as if she had seen a ghost.”

The simile “as if she had seen a ghost” creates an eerie tone, suggesting mystery and a past connection. Throughout the novel, Àbíké-Íyímídé hints at the existence of Sade’s twin sister through many strangers at ANA who have unusual reactions when they see Sade or indicate they recognize her from somewhere. Elizabeth Wang met Sade’s sister on an online forum for survivors of sexual violence and corresponded with her for several months. When she sees Sade for the first time, she is shocked, thinking it is her lost friend from the internet.

“It was like witnessing a social experiment, this seemingly primitive instinct to split off and go into these little groups. It was so different from her home life and reminded her of movies she had grown up watching. She wondered whether people were aware of how many clichés they fulfilled on a daily basis.”

Sade comes to ANA after having spent her entire adolescence isolated at home. The simile of comparing school cliques to a “social experiment” emphasizes Sade’s detachment, as if she is analyzing human behavior. Her position as a true outsider allows her to notice things at the school that are so normalized they have become invisible, like the hidden currents of sexism and classism that govern many of the students’ interactions.

“She turned around, expecting to see students lingering or devilish shadows dancing in the corners. But there was nothing there, just the looming presence of Hawking House.”

Hawking House’s “looming presence” is an example of personification, which gives the house an eerie, almost sentient quality. The “devilish shadows” also invoke a classic haunted atmosphere. Hawking House is home to most of the school’s golden boys, including star swimmers like Jude Ripley and August Owens, who rule the school with their wealth and privilege. However, the house is also a hotbed of patriarchal ideas, and Hawking parties are notoriously dangerous for the school’s female students. As this passage indicates, it is a house whose presence looms large in all aspects of life on ANA’s campus.

“She spent the time between the final bell and dinner locked away in the library. While homework was in some ways important, it wasn’t nearly as important as the other things she needed to accomplish, and she needed to plan how she was going to tackle it all.”

The vague reference to “other things” creates suspense around Sade’s priorities. This passage is also an example of characterization, as it show’s Sade’s inner conflict and suggests her secret, personal mission: She intends to track down and punish Jude Ripley, whom she holds responsible for her sister’s death.

“It wouldn’t be the first time she couldn’t confirm her whereabouts at night and certainly not the last.”

The symptoms of Sade’s struggles with her past trauma and mental health, such as her insomnia, sleepwalking, and tendency to see things that aren’t there, are an example of foreshadowing and suggest a pattern of disappearance or lost time. This also sets up her role as an unreliable narrator. In this passage, for example, Sade cannot say for sure that she was in her bed the whole night when Elizabeth went missing. She knows that she sometimes sleepwalks and does things she doesn’t remember, which calls her innocence into question in the case of her missing roommate.

“I wonder what it is about this school and its obsession with naming rooms after dead white men. It’s a bit concerning, Elizabeth had said after telling Sade this fact, looking very unimpressed with it all.”

At ANA, reminders of the school’s sexist, patriarchal history are everywhere. Many of the rooms are named after men like Alexander the Great, and a statue of the school’s sexist founder holds a prominent place on campus. These reminders are a suggestion that the school has not examined the parts of its past that could be problematic and continues to influence the student body in a negative way.

“Baz shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. I think I’d know if she was meeting someone, we tell each other everything,’ he said. ‘Everything?’ Sade repeated. He nodded. ‘More or less.’ He seemed so sure about it. Like he knew with almost absolute certainty that he and Elizabeth had no secrets between them. But the thing was, everyone had secrets. Things too dark, too ugly to share with the people they loved most. She knew this more than anyone.”

Secrets are everywhere in Where Sleeping Girls Lie, even lurking between close friends. As Baz and Sade start to delve deeper into Elizabeth’s disappearance, it becomes clear that Baz doesn’t know his friend as well as he thought he did. Sade, who understands, for example, the dark secrets her sister kept from her, knows there is often more to someone than meets the eye, even to those who know them best.

“‘Shakespeare was an unhappily married middle-aged man with a tendency to write very one-dimensional women, but fully fleshed men. I’d argue that the only way Shakespeare knew how to write a strong woman was to strip her of her femininity and make her cruel. He had to dehumanize her and reduce her to nothing in order for it to make sense why she was different. She’s the antithesis of the perfect wife. She hates children, she wants dominance, and she speaks her mind…,’ Sade rambled on. She wasn’t sure where it was all coming from. Maybe years of having Shakespeare force-fed to her had finally broken the dam and released this flood of thoughts she apparently had.”

In Sade’s English class, presentations on Shakespeare’s Macbeth reveal highly gendered interpretations of the play, suggesting the vast gulf of experience and opinion between the school’s male and female populations. Sade’s stream-of-consciousness analysis hints at male-dominated legacies created by figures like Shakespeare that continue to shape the reality of students at ANA. Boys at ANA continue to ridicule, “dehumanize,” and violate female students, especially if they don’t conform to patriarchal standards of femininity.

“He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just hate this school sometimes. If one of their elites went missing, there’d be helicopters searching for them day in and day out. They wouldn’t just settle for an email. Headmaster Webber only cares about the issues that affect his pocket. Aka, our donors don’t care and so neither do we. It’s all so fucking predictable,’ he said as the packet finally burst open.”

Baz makes many astute observations about the role of privilege and classism at ANA. Students who come from elite and well-connected families, like Jude Ripley and the Owens twins, are unabashedly given special treatment at ANA, and the school generally turns a blind eye to any wrongdoings. Meanwhile, scholarship students like Elizabeth are largely ignored and forgotten.

“All the bad things that happened and continued to happen around her were clearly her doing. She was bad luck and she needed to leave to make things right.”

After all the tragedy Sade has experienced, she has come to believe that she causes misfortune to befall those close to her. This misplaced sense of guilt and responsibility also comes from blame placed on her by family members like her aunt and father, who accused her of letting her sister die by not watching her closely enough. When bad things begin happening at ANA, like Elizabeth’s disappearance, Sade begins to worry it is her fault. This creates a sense of tension as it calls into question the nature of Sade’s involvement in these mysteries and tragedies.

“How does anyone forget a name like that? But they’d only had one conversation on Friday, so remembering his name, both the first and the last, felt too weird. Like she was indirectly confessing to something.”

When Sade means Jude Ripley, she appears to be intrigued by him and asks some of her friends, like Baz and Persephone, for more information about him. Her interest comes off as a crush, or at least that’s how Baz and Persephone interpret it, because Jude is almost universally lusted after. However, in reality, Sade wants to gather information to avenge her sister.

“Like with Elizabeth and Baz, Sade almost felt like a ghost around the girls. Standing here silently in this private moment. Gate-crashing something intimate and small.”

Sade’s lack of experience with intimacy is most apparent when she is with others who are close to each other. This simile underscores how she often feels invisible or out of place; she is surprised to be included because she has never had access to such relationships.

“She had been at Alfred Nobel Academy for three weeks now. In that short time, she had somehow gotten something she never thought would be possible for someone like herself. Friends.”

Despite the turmoil, anxiety, and dark secrets Sade encounters at ANA, she also begins to make friends and build community. This is a surprise to her, as she has always felt unworthy and undeserving of close relationships, and it begins to fundamentally change the way she sees herself. This shows Sade’s character development and healing journey, as she grows from isolation to connection.

“Whenever she’d watch a movie or read a book where a boy would make a huge declaration of love like that, she never found it romantic. The opposite, she found it disturbing. Almost like the girl was cornered, forced to go along with the master’s puppet show in order to not upset him.”

This passage describes Sade’s discomfort after Jude declares his interest in her to the entire crowded cafeteria. Her reaction reveals how, oftentimes, traditionally romantic gestures are inherently male-centered and don’t take into account a woman’s interest and or desire. Jude thinks he is making a grand gesture, but in reality, it is predatory and controlling, making Sade feel like she has no choice but to go out with him.

“Persephone shook her head, tears bleeding from her eyes and down her face. ‘It’s just speculation. A bunch of rumors. Who would believe me? Or the girls?’”

One of the main factors that prevents girls from speaking up after sexual violence or harassment is the fear of not being taken seriously. In Where Sleeping Girls Lie, many of the girls who do speak up, like Elizabeth and Jamila, are not believed and are threatened and punished by authority figures for reporting their abusers.

“It may have been an unfair assessment given that she didn’t know the full extent of August’s involvement in the chat, but seeing as he was Jude’s best friend and he had lied about being involved with Elizabeth, how could she have expected him to be any different? Even if he didn’t do the vile things Jude did, he had to know about them. Didn’t that make him just as bad?”

Where Sleeping Girls Lie also delves into the role that male silence plays in perpetuating sexual abuse and harassment. August Owens likes to think of himself as a gentleman, chivalrous and old-fashioned, especially in how he treats the women in his life. However, he is aware of Jude’s crimes and says nothing, making him complicit and responsible.

“She thought twins were a curse, split to purge the evil part of the soul. She used to pick them both up, inspect them closely with suspicion, and then she’d always frown at Sade and whisper, ‘You’re the bad one.’”

This passage suggests the symbolism of twinhood as a metaphor for duality and blame. Sade’s aunt believed that Sade was the evil part of the twins’ shared soul, which demonstrates the deep roots of the emotional abuse Sade was subjected to. Her feelings of worthlessness and inherent wickedness have been fed to her since childhood.

“She didn’t know it at the time, that what she felt was something doctors called depression and that it apparently ran through the maternal side of her family. Consumed her great-grandmother Sola, taking her grandmother Taiwo next, and then her mum. What they failed to diagnose was whether these feelings came about because of both the chemicals in their brain as well as the pattern that was the men in their lives.”

This passage highlights a recurring theme of inherited mental illness within Sade’s family, specifically depression, which affects multiple generations of women on the maternal side. Sade also believes that there is a link between biological factors and external influences, like the relationships the women in her family had with controlling and misogynistic men. The narrative connects this pattern to Jamila’s death by suicide, framing it as part of a larger, ongoing cycle. As Sade navigates her experiences at ANA, she becomes aware of these generational struggles and attempts to challenge and disrupt them.

“Doing something did matter—especially if Jude could hurt someone else the same way he hurt her. Even if the headmaster—the guy whose literal job was to protect all his students, not just a privileged few—told her otherwise.”

Here, the narrator describes Elizabeth’s determination to expose Jude after the headmaster fails to believe the story of her assault. Although she is afraid, she knows that Jude will just go on to hurt more girls if she doesn’t act. This passage reveals the bravery and dedication of girls like Elizabeth. Let down by authority figures, Elizabeth, and later Sade and Persephone, take matters into their own hands. They illustrate how women must support and look out for one another when authority figures can’t be trusted.

“This is the problem with you—all of you. You want to say it wasn’t consensual when you face up to the consequences. You’re the one who had been making advances on me for weeks, you’re the one who wanted it. You don’t see me complaining.”

When Elizabeth confronts Jude the night she disappears, he tries to convince her that she wanted to have sex with him the night he assaulted her. His argument is a classic example of gaslighting, trying to convince Elizabeth that what she feels and remembers isn’t real or valid.

“Boys with everything. The world had been and always would be theirs for the taking. Sade had learned to fear the men who had everything, because even the moon, the skies, and the earth could not sate them.”

Here, Sade describes the boys at ANA. Growing up wealthy and privileged in a male-dominated world, the boys at the elite boarding school have developed an intense sense of entitlement. They have always been given special treatment and believe they deserve it. This makes them dangerous because they believe everything, including their female classmates, belongs to them if they want it.

“While I believe in the good that tradition can bring and I’m usually all for it, sometimes traditions should be disrupted. Your staying here will be determined by a trial of how your finals go, as well as teacher reports.”

Surprisingly, the grouchy matron, Miss Blackburn, sides with Sade at the end of the novel, standing up to Headmaster Webber and resending Sade’s expulsion. As a woman, Miss Blackburn can recognize the dangers of tradition that individuals like Webber overlook because history has never marginalized them. Her act is another example of how women bind together throughout the novel, standing up for one another in the face of sexism and violence from male authority figures.

“Sade wished the counselor had been there when Elizabeth was around, then maybe she wouldn’t have felt so alone. Jamila too. Maybe if Jamila could have spoken to someone, she would have known there were other options for her.”

By the end of the novel, Sade recognizes the important role that community has played in her healing as well as the ability to talk about her trauma with a counselor. She knows that her sister and Elizabeth faced their ordeals in intense isolation, and this contributed to their inability to cope.