I feel like I need to tell you that Sleeping Beauties was my very first novel by Stephen King. I’m familiar with some of his others from watching the movies associated with them. It, Christine, The Green Mile, etcetera, but I had never actually sat down to read one of his books until this one. A lot of reviewers like to compare a book with the author’s previous books, but I can’t do that here at all. I was very interested and excited that he wrote this book with his son, because I felt that a collaborative effort of this great an undertaking is a miracle in itself. The book is huge!
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I really liked it, including the parts that I thought were very farfetched. Sure, it’s essentially a fantasy/horror sort of story, so there are a lot of farfetched parts, but the thing that got me the most was how quickly the world went to hell once the women were mostly all asleep. Maybe I have more faith in men than some ladies do, but I feel like people started freaking out and killing each other way too fast for me to believe. Surely the world could last more than a week without us women, right?
Still, I loved the story, I loved how utterly terrible some of the characters were. Some of them were truly the sort that you could hate! When I got my hands on this book, an older lady had just told me that she didn’t like it and didn’t finish it because it had no characters in it that she could like at all, and that she wouldn’t want to be friends with any of them and that that was a big turnoff for her, and yes, I agree in some ways. The thing about it is, that some of the characters really grow and change during this book. Some for the better, and of course some for the worse.
If you don’t know what the book is about and are looking for a summary, all of the women around the world are falling asleep and not waking up again, and nobody knows if they ever will. When they fall asleep they become wrapped in a cocoon, and if anyone tries to wake them up at all, they go berserk like a wild beast and kill the person that woke them. Without the womenfolk, the men of the world are left to their own devices and proceed to go berserk in their own way, not sure if or when the women will ever wake up again, and not really sure how to go on without them either. A mysterious woman is found that can fall asleep and wake up again, and she seems to have other strange abilities as well, and some people want to protect her while others want to turn her over to scientists to be experimented upon.
As far as cautioning against things you may not want to read, or may not approve your children reading if they pick it up, this book contains a lot of profanity, violence, rape or mentions of rape, murder, blood and gore, and same-sex relationships. As much as I personally don’t care about reading any of these things, when you work in a library you come to realize that there are all sorts of things that people consider objectionable in their reading materials.
