I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It is about an unnamed twenty-something in 2000 New York who appears to have everything. She´s pretty, she graduated from Colombia and she has a very generous inheritance that takes care of her every need. But the after the death of her parents sends her into a deep depression she begins to withdraw from life. Feeling that sleep is the only thing that makes her happy anymore she decides to go into ¨hibernation¨for a year. To do so she pretends to have insomnia so she can get sleeping pills from a rogue psychiatrist and takes way above the recommended dosage. This causes her to sleep for days on end and she becomes a recluse with her only connection to the outside world being trips to the local coffee shop and her jealous best friend Reeva. Things take a turn for the worse a few months in when her pill habit worsens and she realizes she´s doing strange things while she´s asleep. At its core, this book is about depression and the impact that it can have on a person's life which made a big impact on me. It was also darkly funny and I was a big fan of the grounded surrealism in the book which was executed very well. I would give it four stars due to personal taste because although I enjoyed reading it when I put it down I did not feel motivated to pick it up. The unrealisticness of the plot and the privileged characters might turn some people off the book and if that is the case I would not recommend reading it because you probably won´t like it.
Risa H.
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