I grew up hearing the old adage "Do it now, there's plenty of time to sleep when you're dead" and I never gave it much thought...until now.

Coming of age meets Comic Books meets The Matrix is the best way I know to describe The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by D.C. Pierson.

Darren, a high school sophomore, meets Eric, a fellow sophomore whom others describe as weird. Turns out they were right. Eric has a secret, as the title says, he never sleeps and he doesn’t have to.

Darren is an artist; he draws great characters out of his imagination and creates an entire universe of them. He doesn’t have small dreams of being a comic book artist; he plans entire series of books, movies, toys and more. With Eric’s help, they create monsters, villains and planets, all while Darren tries to figure out how and why Eric doesn’t sleep.

While I liked the book, there were many things in it that didn’t ring true to me. Darren’s dad is a divorced father raising his two sons. While I get that sometimes people don’t connect with their kids on a lot of levels, at no time is there any acknowledgement that the older son (a neighborhood terrorizing high school senior) has girls spending the night, is doing drugs, has been arrested or is, in general, an unsympathetic jerk. It becomes a joke to Darren that when he calls to ask his dad to do anything the response is “do you have your phone on you” (even though he is calling from that phone) as though the phone is a talisman. Eric’s parents, while more of a traditional nuclear family, don’t seem to notice that their son doesn’t sleep and periodically has to lock himself in his room because he has “bad days.” If these things had happened over a one year period, I could buy that but these things ignored or unnoticed by both Darren’s dad and Eric’s parents have been happening for years.

There is a lot of very typical coming of age “stuff” in the pages between the fantastic opening and interesting/exciting ending. Darren gets a girlfriend, loses his virginity, loses the girlfriend (to his best friend Eric), loses his best friend, gets chased by his brothers gang of friends, etc.. The parts of the story that were “normal” high school stuff were very realistic. The conversations of teens, the way Darren reacts to his first sexual experience, the kids at a party and how they interact, all of this was easy to believe.

The sci-fi/comic book sections of the story were well done. I think there was an homage to The Matrix but perhaps I am the only nerd out there who would make that comparison. Unlike many of the sci-fi classics where good triumphs over evil, Darren (more than once) sacrifices Eric and his unusual condition for the sake of his own happiness and freedom. His remorse is genuine but not overwhelming. Like life, doing the right thing is not always black and white. It is not always an easy decision. Darren discovers this and in doing so, discovers himself. ( )

The most interesting aspect of this book is how few science fiction aspects are in the book until the climax and ending. I felt the pacing was good until then; when they begin being chased, events begin to happen at breakneck pace and I lost the feeling of a realistic and leisurely jaunt that had carried me so swiftly through the rest. By that point, however, I was invested enough in the characters to finish it out, and I think that the ending was appropriate but unsatisfying. ( )

I thought this novel was just a coming-of-age story that morphed into a a Sci/Fi thriller, but at the end I figured it was a work of magical realism. I was so confused by the end of this novel that I went back and read book reviews and they say nothing about magical realism, so maybe I am wrong about all of that. It is a book about friendship, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It is also about when those things get in the way of each other. At any rate, I can’t figure out the ending and am not sure that I wish to do so. This was not the worst book I have read, but it certainly won’t make my best of the year list. It was not a total waste of time, but there are better geek nerd coming of age books out there. ( )

You might remember this story from the famous "Yahoo! Answers" response to someone who asked for a summary, wanting to skip the summer reading. Then D.C. Pierson himself responded, saying how disappointed he was trying to avoid it because it sounded like work, when the book is much better than other classics that could pop up on such a list. (Charlie Brown got assigned "War and Peace", and that was just for Christmas vacation!)

But the book is everything Pierson said it was. The thing is it's really rather... how do I put this... The title promises science-fiction, but it's really more literary. It only gets into supernatural stuff in the last sixth, and it has nothing to do with what takes place before. The bulk is more about two geeky friends in a typical "enjoying their comic books video games when everyone rags on that and wants them to like football". A wild girlfriend appears! to put them back on the mainstream track and drama ensues. It's a branch off the "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" tree. But I do recommend it. ( )

This book is... quirky. It's mainly a story about an adolescent friendship, with all of the things that go along with that when you're in high school: cliques, girls, parties (or the lack invitations to them), parents, trying all the stuff your parents don't want you to know about. It would be a pretty standard YA story except for the fact that one of the characters never sleeps. Has never slept, will never sleep. That's odd enough, and would make for an interesting character study, but then we get the addition of some wacky fantasy-like elements.

I walked away from this book completely stumped as to whether or not the last third of the story was really meant to have happened, or if we're dealing with an unreliable narrator, psychosis, or the influence of drugs/alcohol/extremely little sleep combined with stimulants. I'm still not sure, and rather than feeling like the ambiguity is on purpose I'm left feeling like the story is a tiny bit confused. Most of it seemed very realistic in nature, but what was not realistic was really effing not realistic. And it didn't make me think "hmm, I wonder why the author made this decision. What was he trying to say?" Instead, I felt like it was a situation where, much like the two teenage boy protagonists, the decisions were made because they were cool and fun. Is that the point? To put you in the mind of a teenage boy more fully? I've never been one, so it's hard to be sure.

This is a fast read with some interesting characters, but the muddled story kept me from truly loving it. ( )