Dreams of Sleep (Contemporary American Fiction)

Rating:
Summary: lovely
Review: i loved this book, especially the characterization of Alice. She makes me feel normal, with her strange outbursts and feelings. She's a woman who goes by omens, including what's carved by strangers' fingernails on a frozen package of chicken. She strangely salivates as she picks at her daughter's head for scalp buildup. This isn't all what the story's about, but i just couldn't put the book down. Josephine makes each of the three characters a star for one chapter, so you can really get inside their heads and receive information that the other characters don't know. It's about hope and despair and human relationships, the darkness of marriage and the light at the end of it. I loved how Alice follows Claire around, almost stalking her that way, like the wife does with the other woman. i like how she smokes just as it gets dark, when she feels the most despair. i really related to alice. i think josephine is a very gifted writer.

Rating:
Summary: What awful people
Review: I read constantly and seldom have I encountered a more repellent group of characters. I had to read the entire book for a book club (or I would have tossed it away after 50 pages), and found myself hoping for a plague, a nuclear holocaust, anything to remove such repulsive people. Vain, apathetic, stupid, cruel, selfish...it's difficult to care about a book when you despise ALMOST all of the characters. Even Iris had her moments of cruelty. I wonder why the author created them and hope they're not based on real people. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.