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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
I picked this up purely because it was a Stephen King book, but I was very disappointed. So boring, and it took me ages to get through because I had no enjoyment while reading it.
3.5 stars. This is my second Stephen King, though it was probably the first one I gave consideration to reading (aside from my long ago attempt at The Shining, which maybe I’ll get back to one day). I love the idea of this book; it’s not exactly horror, and as King puts it, there should be enough reality in any horror-esque book to make it truly scary. There is a lot of work put into this book, from the biblical imagery to the research into prison systems. I almost wanted to write down all the references to the story of Adam and Eve and look back through them at the end. The snake, the otherworld, the dynamics between man and woman...it’s all very intricate without seeming to be. I suppose it is a bit obvious rather than oblique in some places, but I don’t think that takes away from the book. I also think that prisons are an interesting place to examine within our society; recently they have been spotlighted more often in popular media, and perhaps that will spark change in a system that seems to do as much harm if not more than good.
I do have to say, this could have been done in less than 700 pages. I’ll probably say something similar about any future King books as well; it’s one thing I just don’t care for about his writing. If I need a list of characters at the beginning to know what’s going on, I’m going to be at least a little annoyed. That being said, once I got going, I could more or less keep track on my own. And my other general dislike in terms of his books is the violence/overuse of gritty description (one that I really didn’t love was “orgy of resurrection”). It’s just not wholly necessary in my opinion; bloodshed shouldn’t be the only way to create intensity. And in all fairness, it isn’t the only tool used in this book. I just find myself getting bored and skimming when it comes to pages and pages of a fight scene.
Overall, I did enjoy this book. The themes are carried out well, there is an array of personalities and characters, and the messages we are asked to consider are poignant. What would we do, given the chance to rebuild our society? I have to imagine that some aspects of Our World would be hard to refuse. It’s also interesting that this is written by a man. I have to wonder if the ending would be different if written by a woman. I think I wanted it to end differently, but I can be satisfied with this ending as well.
I do have to say, this could have been done in less than 700 pages. I’ll probably say something similar about any future King books as well; it’s one thing I just don’t care for about his writing. If I need a list of characters at the beginning to know what’s going on, I’m going to be at least a little annoyed. That being said, once I got going, I could more or less keep track on my own. And my other general dislike in terms of his books is the violence/overuse of gritty description (one that I really didn’t love was “orgy of resurrection”). It’s just not wholly necessary in my opinion; bloodshed shouldn’t be the only way to create intensity. And in all fairness, it isn’t the only tool used in this book. I just find myself getting bored and skimming when it comes to pages and pages of a fight scene.
Overall, I did enjoy this book. The themes are carried out well, there is an array of personalities and characters, and the messages we are asked to consider are poignant. What would we do, given the chance to rebuild our society? I have to imagine that some aspects of Our World would be hard to refuse. It’s also interesting that this is written by a man. I have to wonder if the ending would be different if written by a woman. I think I wanted it to end differently, but I can be satisfied with this ending as well.
It had it’s really good “Stephen King” story. It was just to damn long and drawn out.
That day began like any other day, but by the end of the first 24 hours, nearly all of the women in the world had fallen asleep, wrapped in cocoons that spun from their bodies as soon as they lost consciousness. It was called Aurora, after the princess in the Disney version of the Sleeping Beauty story. Only none of the women could be woken with a kiss. And woe betide anyone who tried to wake them from their slumber.
In the Appalachian town of Dooling, a strange woman appears, just as the Aurora plague reaches that part of the world. She calls herself Eve Black, and she doesn't fall asleep like the rest of the women. To Clint Norcross, the resident psychiatrist at the Dooling Correctional Center for women, it appears that Eve is the key to Aurora. Eve doesn't disagree, and she strikes a deal with Norcross: keep me safe, and the women will come back--if they want to.
Meanwhile, the women of Dooling have awoken in another place: it looks like Dooling, but as if a great disaster had hit it several years ago. They gradually begin a new life in this strange world, while in the old world, the men of Dooling are squaring off over Eve Black.
Sleeping Beauties is quite the book. It posits a dystopian world in which there are no women--however temporarily--while at the same time showing a semi-utopia in Our Place, as the women call the strange world in which they awaken. It's not a complete paradise: there is still friction between some of the women, there is still petty crime. But there is nothing there on the scale of the violence that erupts amongst the men of Dooling once the women have been gone for a few days.
I would like to believe that if something like the Aurora plague happened in the real world, men wouldn't react quite the way Stephen and Owen King describe. But in today's climate, where a certain portion of men bombard the Rotten Tomatoes site with nasty reviews of a female-led superhero movie that they haven't even seen yet, I fear it is all too likely a scenario. I don't subscribe to the idea that women are a non-agressive, "softer" balance to men at all, but I do believe that if women were listened to more, if we were respected as human beings, the world would be a better place. *steps off soapbox*
Sleeping Beauties is a sprawling piece of speculative fiction, with a gigantic "what-if" as its premise, and the King team handle it deftly. The characters are well drawn, and the plot, for such a big book, is pretty tight. I enjoyed it very much.
In the Appalachian town of Dooling, a strange woman appears, just as the Aurora plague reaches that part of the world. She calls herself Eve Black, and she doesn't fall asleep like the rest of the women. To Clint Norcross, the resident psychiatrist at the Dooling Correctional Center for women, it appears that Eve is the key to Aurora. Eve doesn't disagree, and she strikes a deal with Norcross: keep me safe, and the women will come back--if they want to.
Meanwhile, the women of Dooling have awoken in another place: it looks like Dooling, but as if a great disaster had hit it several years ago. They gradually begin a new life in this strange world, while in the old world, the men of Dooling are squaring off over Eve Black.
Sleeping Beauties is quite the book. It posits a dystopian world in which there are no women--however temporarily--while at the same time showing a semi-utopia in Our Place, as the women call the strange world in which they awaken. It's not a complete paradise: there is still friction between some of the women, there is still petty crime. But there is nothing there on the scale of the violence that erupts amongst the men of Dooling once the women have been gone for a few days.
I would like to believe that if something like the Aurora plague happened in the real world, men wouldn't react quite the way Stephen and Owen King describe. But in today's climate, where a certain portion of men bombard the Rotten Tomatoes site with nasty reviews of a female-led superhero movie that they haven't even seen yet, I fear it is all too likely a scenario. I don't subscribe to the idea that women are a non-agressive, "softer" balance to men at all, but I do believe that if women were listened to more, if we were respected as human beings, the world would be a better place. *steps off soapbox*
Sleeping Beauties is a sprawling piece of speculative fiction, with a gigantic "what-if" as its premise, and the King team handle it deftly. The characters are well drawn, and the plot, for such a big book, is pretty tight. I enjoyed it very much.
I was very invested in the first half of the book. However, part two dragged for me so it took me over 3 months to read this book. The chapters that were plot driven were great but most of the book was filled with filler. 200 pages could have been taken off. There were too many characters to keep track of so I often got them confused and not enough focus on the main character of conflict. She’s mysterious and remains that way which is kinda frustrating. This books also lacked the fear factor that I was hoping for and the ending was underwhelming. Just read the graphic novel adaptation to save time.
Wow. What a read. And you know What? I didn't hate the ending. So good on you Stephen and Owen. Ha ha
The most pressing question first: Why is this thing 800 pages long? This is basically an Outer Limits episode, would have made sense as a Buffy episode (or Xena episode, for that matter), but the excessive pages and the odd pacing do not do the book any favours.
Also, the very, very gender essentialist premise leaves me with a loooot of questions. What happens to non-binary people, for instance? Sleep, no sleep? Do they cocoon up, but stay awake? To bigendered people? Do they fall half asleep? Sleepwalk? Cocooned, but awake? Awake, but cocooned? There's a lot of bullshit to unpack here and I... just do not want to. King fans, you tackle this one. I just don't wanna.
I was expecting a creepy horror novel and I got a very lengthy, convoluted tale which seems not to know what it wants half the time. It wants to be both a sweeping dystopian horror tale of Emmerichian proportions AND a claustrophobic smalltown horror tale.
It can't be both, and that's point at which this completely falls apart for me. I did not really care for the cast of thousands and at some point just stopped learning names and referencing them, it did not matter for the most part who everyone was, which ought to be more of a problem. That it was not confirms that the characters were mostly cardboard.
As a small-town horror story it falls flat because it just is not that creepy. A lot of the time there were moments which I can see working as jumpscares in a movie version, but that does not mean that I felt terribly frightened at any point during the novel. There was little suspense to me at all, in fact, the most interesting thing to ponder for me being, "When will this finally end and who thought it was a good idea to mash these different things together?" I had a similar problem of scale with [b:The Outsider|36124936|The Outsider|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1524596540s/36124936.jpg|57566471], so maybe that is just how King writes these days? I don't know.
As a feminist horror novel it is way less scary than, say, [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808]. It paints its views in broad strokes and this makes the ending all the more unfitting to me. And that is mostly due to the way things were set up in the novel.
I'm glad that Mr King must have enjoyed Orange is the New Black - the autobiographical novel as much as I did, though.
Also, the very, very gender essentialist premise leaves me with a loooot of questions. What happens to non-binary people, for instance? Sleep, no sleep? Do they cocoon up, but stay awake? To bigendered people? Do they fall half asleep? Sleepwalk? Cocooned, but awake? Awake, but cocooned? There's a lot of bullshit to unpack here and I... just do not want to. King fans, you tackle this one. I just don't wanna.
I was expecting a creepy horror novel and I got a very lengthy, convoluted tale which seems not to know what it wants half the time. It wants to be both a sweeping dystopian horror tale of Emmerichian proportions AND a claustrophobic smalltown horror tale.
It can't be both, and that's point at which this completely falls apart for me. I did not really care for the cast of thousands and at some point just stopped learning names and referencing them, it did not matter for the most part who everyone was, which ought to be more of a problem. That it was not confirms that the characters were mostly cardboard.
As a small-town horror story it falls flat because it just is not that creepy. A lot of the time there were moments which I can see working as jumpscares in a movie version, but that does not mean that I felt terribly frightened at any point during the novel. There was little suspense to me at all, in fact, the most interesting thing to ponder for me being, "When will this finally end and who thought it was a good idea to mash these different things together?" I had a similar problem of scale with [b:The Outsider|36124936|The Outsider|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1524596540s/36124936.jpg|57566471], so maybe that is just how King writes these days? I don't know.
As a feminist horror novel it is way less scary than, say, [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808]. It paints its views in broad strokes and this makes the ending all the more unfitting to me. And that is mostly due to the way things were set up in the novel.
Spoiler
Like, is that masculine wish fulfillment? I love my brother and my male friends and could not imagine being separated from a male child. But. Had I been one of the women who had lived in the town we were introduced to, violent abusers and with their "bitchbags" and rapist teenagers and all, you BET I would have used that veto and stayed in Magical [b:The World Without Us|248787|The World Without Us|Alan Weisman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441986417s/248787.jpg|241063] Land and left everybody male to fend for themselves.I'm glad that Mr King must have enjoyed Orange is the New Black - the autobiographical novel as much as I did, though.
I wanted to love this book because the premise was so interesting to me, but I think it would have served better as a television series. When a book starts with a cast list, you should know you're about to spend a huge amount of time with side characters and stories you really don't care about. My opinion toward the book also soured a bit when
In any case. It's a great idea, but way too stretched out for such a claustrophobic setting.
Spoiler
one of the guards is shown to be molesting the female inmates and we get to read a description about his genitals and the sad sad handjob she's forced to give him. I get it. It's trying to be "realistic" about abuse in female prisons, but did I really need to read about it in such a exploitative and pornographic way? It turned me off to the book big time. I put it down right after that scene and felt just super gross about it. I struggled to pick up the book again.In any case. It's a great idea, but way too stretched out for such a claustrophobic setting.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen and Owen King, is a perfect example of an idea being more important to the authors than characters or story. The idea in this book is: what if all the women in the world were gone? It gets a Stephen King twist, of course. Here, the women have succumb to a mysterious condition that puts their bodies to sleep, cocooned in a web-like substance, and sends them to another world. Where this book goes wrong is that I think it required a lot of editing to get rid of extraneous subplots and characters and a lot more work to create characters that are better than stock villains and heroes. At times, I thought Sleeping Beauties was written like two men creating something that women might like to see because most of the men are just bad dudes and most of the women are victims or ass-kickers. Over and over, this book declares that women are better than men, using tired stereotypes that are as irritating as straight-up misogyny...
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.
Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.