Infant Insomnia

by Annaliese Lemmon

Ama’s six-week-old daughter is failing to thrive, and the doctor doesn’t know what to do. Sacrificing her sleep, she looks into the future to see if she can figure out how to help her baby. But while a few futures show that her daughter lives, many show her passing away within the month.

20 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Annaliese Lemmon graduated from BYU with a degree in computer science. She lives with her equally nerdy husband and three children in Seattle, where she tries to write amid the noise. When not writing, she enjoys cooking (helpful with her son being allergic to dairy, gluten, and nuts) and playing board games. Her favorite authors include Brandon Sanderson and Shannon Hale.

Reviews

[Dora · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll be honest, it wasn't great. I came here because of the wonderful artwork and the promising synopsis, but the actual story was quite boring and uninteresting.

Let me explain of my two star rating.

When writing a short story, the main character needs to be engaging to the reader. I felt that Ama, the mother, was quite scarce and baffled as it comes to her "quest" of saving her daughter Klara, and that was extended to the author as well, who I feel tried to make us empathize with her in a very unsuccessful way.
Then there are people presented/mentioned. Ama's father, husband, mother. They feel like strangers rather than family to her, cold and distant. Where are the bonds the author should have portrayed between them?
The narration can be confusing as well, especially when Ama travels in her dreams to the future and into a certain morbid scene of her daughter's death.

But what personally annoyed me the most was that I didn't feel or believe there was any connection between Ama and her daughter Klara. I didn't feel the love, the anguish, the stress. Yes the author mentions how Ama feels all those things, but I as a reader want to see them in my mind's eye and experience them through a powerful and vivid narration, which in this case never happened. It was flat and quite dry for me, but I still believe the idea behind the story to be intriguing.

[Joe Vasicek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this short story quite a bit. Andy and I were in a writing group together in college, but I'd never seen this one before, so it was a fun read. The main character tends to think more like an engineer, which is probably why other reviewers say that they didn't really feel a connection between the mother and child, but I didn't get that at all (probably because I grew up with an engineer for a father). The connection was definitely there, it was just manifest in terms of working hard to solve the problem at hand. The most interesting part of the story was how people's ages manifest differently in the magic dimension. Would definitely like to see more stories in this universe!