Sleep Donation

Karen Russell has quickly became one of my favorites ever. She has such a gift for creating images brighter than I knew could exist in text. Her writing is effortlessly vivid and the world she creates is thought provoking and deeply, human-ly flawed.

She is so so good at weaving you into a blinding blissful fantasy and sharply spitting you out into cold hard reality. She got me again with this one.

Some of the writing and introspective bits from Trish are a little too on the nose for me. This would have been absolutely perfect if there was less inner monologue. It also feels a little preachy at times. She’s not wrong, but something feels off about it.

I also didn’t find it particularly scary, although I do have a very high tolerance for horror.

I really wanted to like Sleep Donation; it had a fascinating premise, and the prose was sometimes very good. Unfortunately I ended up feeling that the author was a bit too enamored of the sound of her own eloquence. Also, I would have liked an actual ending.