rohshey
Written on Oct 30, 2017
Imagine a world where the female population falls asleep a fine- spider-like web cocoons them. They are breathing and have regular pulse rates, but if you awaken them, they go insane. Crazy, ax-wielding, freaks with a twist when it comes to their own offspring. Freaktastic right? And yet with all its Stephen king trademark creepy elements, I was utterly disappointed.
This isn't a *bad* book. But it isn't very good either. The main problem (for me, anyway) is that the characters just somehow never come alive. By the very end of the book, I was still experiencing moments when a character would be mentioned and I would ask myself, "Who is that? And what am I supposed to remember about them, and where do they fit into the story?". And even the better-drawn characters (the ones I could actually keep track of) seemed oddly two-dimensional.
The book is full of political messages aimed at man’s role in controlling and oppressing women. Topics mentioned are particularly relevant to today’s current events, however, in my opinion, Sleeping Beauties efforts failed miserably. The allegorical and sexual-politics aspects of the book are handled in a very thudding, heavy-handed way. In particular, the way that some of the character-arcs resolve feels patently false- not like natural outworkings of where psychology and experience would lead that particular person, but instead just where the story needed them to be to fit the points the authors are trying to make. This works in a short book like 'Animal Farm", but in a work like' Sleeping Beauties', in which you're expected to spend 700 pages with these (so-called) people, it's rather unsatisfying.
Lastly, I genuinely feel this needed to be trimmed and edited. A lot of threads held little value, and the story dragged at times.
I needed more suspense, action-scenes, and freaky goodness.
