My Year of Rest & Relaxation

This book stars a woman in her 20’s-30’s who is is so fed up with her current life that she decides that the only option is to passively sleep through a full calendar year. Obviously this would be difficult without pharmaceutical intervention but lucky for her, she has an entire pharmacy’s worth of sleeping pill prescriptions at her disposal. All she needs is the right combination to keep her knocked out for 12 months straight.

It’s hard for me to discern the exact point of this novel. The absurdity of the plot is amusing enough to keep me turning pages, but even after finishing the book, I’m left confused as to what the author’s purpose was in writing this.

The main character remains unnamed the entire novel. That allows the reader to put any woman in her place.

The book is absurd but not impossible. Honestly, in the right period of my life it would have sounded like a great idea. It’s hard to place the main character. Her life seems miserable, two dead parents, and only one of whom she mourns. On and off relationship with the craziest guy on the planet -it’s easy to see why she might want to sleep it away.

But through all of this, she treats Reva, the only person who truly cares for her, like shit. She dodges her phone calls, says rude things to her and judges everything she decides to do. But guess what: Reva had the courage to endure.

This book is highly entertaining and definitely stops there. Though not much actually happens, I found this book to be a page turner that kept me wanting more.