A review by karenliu
The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe

1.0

I was pretty excited about reading this book due to the high ratings and synopsis. However I was thoroughly disappointed. The writing was good, but storytelling was awful. I just couldn't grow to care about the characters - any of them. I suppose it's because there wasn't anything remotely likeable about any of them. The failure to build emotional investment in the characters unfortunately made the rest of book incredibly boring since the handful of characters seem to be the only people in the universe, with fates inextricably tied up with each other. The narrative jumped between past and present, split up in stages the way sleep is - I concede, a suitable literary device - but I had zero investment in learning how the past became the present. Even when the threads finally started coming together, the increasingly unrealistic character development made for a very lackluster conclusion. In short, as a reader I was not engaged and the only feeling I experienced throughout was impatience for the book to end.