I adored this book, but I also completely understand why many weren't impressed with it or even despised it. It has pretentious, filthy rich literary characters being shitty and doing nothing, the bane of so many worse literary novels. Literally, she does almost nothing. She sleeps, she wakes up, she takes pills, she blacks out and does something crazy and we never learn exactly what, she takes more pills and sleeps again. And she suffers basically no consequences, physically or mentally from taking a dozen sleeping pills a day FOR A YEAR. Even though Reva, the unnamed MC's friend, is just as messed up as the MC in certain ways, she's the only thing tethering the MC to the real world, and she consistently pushes Reva away… until the end, which you can tell what's going to happen about three quarters of the way through.
On the other hand, I was in the mood for a book like this, where the MC is unlikeable, nearly unredeemable, not because they're inherently bad, but because they're so fucking vapid they can't see out of their own head. Depression is like that, though. The MC's wealth doesn't keep her from horrible depression that she disguises with her possibly fatal self help routine. The only good thing she has to say about herself is that she's still pretty, even after wasting away to nothing from sleeping pills. She hangs desperately, pathetically onto the memory of her awful ex boyfriend, because her parents showed her no empathy and she wants to be mistreated by someone. Attention = love. That's extremely relatable, even if she's too far gone in her own head to be totally sympathetic.
My favorite character, though, is Dr. Tuttle. She is an amazingly insane character, and a much-needed comic relief in the bleakness of the book, prescribing anything and everything she can get her hands on and rambling about stuff that isn't even pseudoscience, just health theories that make no sense. If there were any justice or sanity in that world, she'd lose her license, (or wouldn't be allowed to get one in the first place,) but that's besides the point.
It's the kind of book you have to be in a certain headspace to read, and that's OK.
by teenypanini
1 Comment
I really liked this book but also understood why someone else would not. I recommended it to my sister who liked it too and I think its because we can both appreciate what it’s like to be a sleepy girl who just wants to sleep.