Sleep Donation by Karen Russell

    Apocalypse, the insomnia edition. A world where a certain percentage of the population is being driven mad, or even dead, by inability to sleep. A world where one can donate sleep and dreams that go with it. The scariest thing in the world like that is…what kind of dreams can be donating? What if some of them are nightmares?
   Intriguing concept, literary execution, even excellent art panels…and yet, it didn’t quite work for me. I’m not sure why, being no stranger to nightmares, I should have probably found it more engaging. There’s just something about the style of the narrative that didn’t quite work for me. It was almost as if the book was entirely too self-aware of being an experiment. It’s almost…precocious, in a way.
    This is an acclaimed author writing a book bound to produce acclaim in that ‘look how daring, look how original’ way and sure enough, some of it might be deserved, but in the end for me this was a somewhat credulity stretching plot with too bathetic of a resolution. A different, more definitive ending, might have elevated this, but as is, it was just decent enough, conceptually interesting, but underwhelming in execution. User mileage is certain to vary with this one.