At first, I thought this book was one I’ll relate to. The want to sleep all day. I can get behind that. What I can’t get behind is the privilege, manipulation, and hatred for the main character. What an asshole!

This book is dangerous. It promotes the use of prescription medication abuse. The main character is “tall and thin and blond and pretty and young” (her own words) and dislikes nearly everyone and everything, as if she has rolled a condom onto her heart. She’s wealthy and fit and well-educated and chic and has this idea that she’ll hibernate for an entire year – something she does with the aid of psychiatric medications.

The narrator thinks she is above everybody and everything. I desperately wanted her to suffer heart failure or have a seizure. She is such a horrible person. She blacks out, does things she can’t remember, and her only care is that she comes to without any harm to herself.

I read this book, so you didn’t need to. This book is abuse for the soul, and there is nothing good about it. ( )

Excellent . More about now than then, so I don’t think the ending fits well. But, the writing, well so good, so intelligent ... could not (as they say) put it down... ( )

I'll be honest; when I saw this title, I was hoping for one of those autobiographical books where the author walks away from her life for a year. Not that I'm tempted to do that or anything. I totally get why there's a slew of books about middle-aged middle-class white women walking away from their lives. I just don't want to read about it.

I think my year of rest and relaxation would involve a cottage near a saltwater beach, with internet access and less people than one usually finds near the ocean. Maybe being a lab grunt for a nice marine biology researcher. I would find that very relaxing. If you hear of any openings, let me know.

A book about grief, and aesthetics. Critique of late capitalism. Critique of the myth of beauty as truth. It’s no accident that at the end of the novel the protagonist sheds her expensive aesthetic objects, including herself as aesthetic and sexual (pornographic, in fact) object, for minimalist thrifting and an emotional relationship with things, things that have been lived with humble, forgotten others. A rewriting of Sleeping Beauty, like a stereotypical royal she grew up wealthy in goods and poor in love; her parents are cold and distant, her mother dies of an overdose like some character remnant from the Valley of the Dolls. As a result, the narrator suffers from a lack of self-worth, most evident in her sadomasochistic romance with Trevor. The narrator’s other prince, enfant terrible of the art world, takes the husk of her social self and markets it as art. Shedding her skin, a fox whose fur has been harvested to feed the human ego, the narrator sits, peeled and renewed, like some of Angela Carter’s characters, in The Bloody Chamber among the living in Central Park. Flawed though her helpers are–her insecure friend Reva who is nevertheless the only person who says “I love you,” her batty shrink who prescribes her a pharmacopoeia that would kill an ox–they contribute to her heroine’s journey to self-love. Spoiler: Reva’s fall from the Twin Towers is symbolically the fall of American capitalism. We should all wake up before it’s too late. ( )

This book was something else. I loved it. Was it weird? Yes. Was the plot far-fetched? Yes. Is the narrator awful? Again, yes. But I couldn't put it down. Come to see what all of the fuss is about; stay for the more-than-copious amount of pills and many good laughs at our narrator's expense. ( )