Becky's Reviews > Sleeping Beauties

Sigh. I think that my Constant Reader card is going to be revoked soon. Of King's last 5 books, the best rating that I was able to give was a "It was good, I guess..." 3 star. One I thought was absolute shit, and I'm pretending absolute shit's two sequels just don't exist so I don't have to read them.

Then there's this book. Holy hell. I have issues with this book, oh yes indeed. This was a collaboration between Stephen and Owen King (SK's youngest child), and I don't think it was an altogether successful one, to be as kind as I possibly can be. I'm sure that there are people who will like this book, maybe even love it, but alas, I am not one of them.

I haven't read Owen's books yet, though I own both of them (and Owen's wife Kelly Braffet's book too) as part of my KingFam collection. I don't know his style or skill, and I can't really put the blame on him for the things that I don't like in this book. Not all of it anyway. I have seen Papa King's tendency to get a bit heavy-handed regarding politics, so I'm just gonna lump them both together, and assign equal culpability for this mess.

Because equality.

So, let's just get started, hmm? The usual warning applies: This review will be spoilery, ranty, and rambling, so read at your own risk if you haven't finished the book yet.

There are two main aspects to this story - one is horror, where one day, women stop waking up, cocoons form around their sleeping bodies, and trying to wake or otherwise disturbing the women in their cocoons is a big mistake, because they "awaken" violently and viciously. The second part is a fantasy aspect, where we have a supernatural emissary who is involved somehow, as well as a magical tree and magical animals, and on the other side of the tree, the sleeping women, or at least their souls or spirits or... something. Their physical cocooned bodies remain wherever they fell asleep, but their consciousness wakes up in a Treeside/wasteland version of their town, where they set about getting on with their lives and rebuilding society without men... IE: "Paradise".

As the women fall asleep, and nobody knows what's causing it, what it means, or whether the women will ever wake up again, chaos immediately ensues and societal stability collapses, because who will cook and clean and make babies and then take care of them and crochet decorative end-table doilies and remember when the mortgage is due and ensure men have clean underwear and matching socks and ironed undershirts and shit, and just generally enable men's lives?

Eventually, the women of Dooling, WV (who stand in for ALL women) are offered a choice - to stay Treeside and continue building their society and form a new world based around the ideals of womankind, or return home to the cruel man-filled real world.

I get what this book was trying to do, the point it was trying to make. But I just could not roll my eyes harder at the way it went about trying to do it. It was SO heavy handed. All of the ways that men are bad at life, or bad people, were just shoved in the reader's face ad nauseum. They are violent, thoughtless, rapey, manipulative, angry, inconsiderate, etc. I can go on and on... the book certainly did. Or I could sum up just about the whole book with this:


As commendable as it is for two successful, white, heterosexual men to try to make a statement about gender equality, the #MeToo movement, etc, this book failed at achieving anything meaningful, insightful, or new. To me, it just read and felt like 702 pages of mansplaining the patriarchy, and that women are people, too. Gee, thanks, guys. Never would've gotten that on my own.

This book makes SO MANY generalizations and assumptions, about men AND women. You know that saying "You can't see the forest for the trees."? This book was the opposite, and saw only two "rival" forests. If you have a penis, you're in Forest A. If you have a vagina, you're in Forest B.

I say rival because I mean it. There is not ONE successful, happy, equal relationship between a man and a woman in this book. Now, I know that every relationship is going to have its issues, but not one relationship where a woman is not victimized by or blames a man for her unhappiness? Not one man who doesn't blame women for his problems, or abuse or hate them? Even the main characters, husband and wife Clint and Lila, are pitted against each other right from the beginning when she (incorrectly) suspects him of having had an affair 15 years ago and a love child as a result, thus lying to her for the majority of their marriage, and making her resent and pick apart every single thing he's ever done, forgetting that she, as a partner, has the right to speak the fuck up if she's bothered by things, like, say, getting a pool she didn't want, and resents, but never mentioned. In a book that has a cast list of characters a mile long (seriously), it's unrealistic and annoying that there was not ONE normal, healthy relationship, but hey, the Kings had to hammer the point home, I guess.

So let's come back to the central plot of this book, which is that all women have been hurt by men, and the Aurora (what the magic sleep is known as) gives them the choice whether to return to the real world (with men) or to stay Treeside and start over, building society again based on the perfection that is woman. (*eyeroll*) There's a second part to this, though, which is a test for the men. Evie (our supernatural emissary) is being blamed for causing it, and as expected, the menfolk want to kindly ask her to stop it. The test is thus: Evie has pegged Clint as her protector, and if he fails to keep her alive until the women make their choice, then they lose the opportunity to choose and can never wake up. (She then goads the men into wanting to kill her, because she wants the women to stay, because she's a misandrist.)

So here's the run-down. The 50-100ish women of Dooling have to unanimously choose whether ALL 3 billion women throughout the world will stay Treeside and be "free", or be able to resume their real lives AND whether the billions of men left behind would go extinct, since there would be no women to continue the species. And ONE MAN has to stand in protection of Evie to even give the Dooling women a chance to make that choice.

She doesn't explain this to any of the women, of course, until AFTER Clint succeeds in protecting her, and then only that they have to choose, but not any of the millions of questions that I'd need answered before I could make an educated choice.

I have problems with this. First, the women's bodies are still in the real world. They are still cocooned, and thus STILL UNDER THE CONTROL OF MEN. They can be moved, killed, burned, and if their bodies die, the women's Treeside souls or spirits or whatever disappear. We're shown, repeatedly, seriously OVER AND OVER AND OVER, that men are shits who will use any excuse to hurt, exploit, or kill women, and this is like handing them all women on a silver platter to do with as they will. Sometimes, like the case of the teen boy who tried raping a cocooned woman, it doesn't turn out that well for the guy, but the "Blowtorch Brigade" is just torching women because a] they are using the excuse that they are dangerous or b] they just wanna because they can. And of course there are other men who kill the women in more traditional ways, like a bullet to the head. So, I would not say that these women are "free" or "safe" from men.

Secondly, that's a hell of a choice to put on an ordinary woman. Not a choice at all, really.
Option #1: Stay "asleep" but "free", in your happy woman-land, which means the following:
- You don't know what that means for your physical bodies WHICH ARE STILL UNDER THE CONTROL OF MEN (men who are having a teeny tiny bit of a breakdown, by the way) and random natural occurrences, like fires and floods and earthquakes and such, that might kill your body.
- You will be taking away the autonomy of roughly 3 BILLION women to decide their own fates
- You'll have to rebuild society from scratch in a wasteland (because Treeside, or "Our Place" as the women call it, is apparently the future version of earth, after men are extinct)
- ...which means that a single 'Stay' vote decides the fate of all women, but ALSO all men.

Option #2: Go back to normal life, where men might hurt or kill you, where you can't walk down the street without fear, where failure to watch your drink closely enough might end up disastrously, or where you're in prison or otherwise powerless... but you AREN'T responsible for a worldwide extinction event.

This is one of the generalizations that I mentioned before, because OF COURSE the women would do the right thing and vote to return, because women are the thoughtful, consequence-aware, maternal, responsible sex, who would not want to bear the weight of responsibility for half of the world's extinction, and of course they miss their families, etc.

But there are women out there who have been SERIOUSLY hurt by men, and life, and who would be more than happy to start over again in a world without men. Maybe they wouldn't care that it's selfish, if it meant that their lives wouldn't be terrible anymore. And a single dissent is all it would take. Yet that's never a real possibility here. It's briefly a risk, but then, of course, someone steps in, saves the day, and the sacrifice and love shown make everything OK again.

Ugh. And that woman, the one who was thinking of cutting off the possibility of return, had almost NO legit reasons for being willing to make that decision for so many. Oh, your ex has anger issues and punched a wall and NOT you so you already left him? How traumatic for you. *dead eye stare*

Anyway. I know that this review is all over the place, and I'm sorry for that. But this is a long book that has big ideas (big, but not good), and it's all swimming around in my head like "UGH! AND THIS AND THIS AND OH, THIS THING TOO!"

For instance, there is a bit of anti-gun rhetoric included, semi but not really in passing. There's also a random and completely unnecessary scene with a white cop accidentally killing an unarmed and innocent black person which is shoehorned in at the end. The cop is then left to wonder whether they'd have reacted differently had it been a white person, and coming at the end of the book, it really feels gratuitous and tacked-on.

I am really disappointed that this book, which is centered around gender relations and equality (or lack thereof) makes not one single reference to how Aurora would affect non-binary and transgender people. Aurora is a MAGIC affliction, and one could say that the whole point of it is to give those hurt by men a chance to rebuild a better, more accepting and less dangerous life. Why wouldn't trans women (or anyone that's not a cisgender male) be included? I don't claim to be an expert, since I can only live my experience, but I think that one could argue that if women have it hard, trans women have it harder, and are less understood and accepted, more likely to suffer violence at the hands of men, so I would THINK that their lives and experiences would be valid for inclusion in the Aurora... but nope. Not a single mention. Invisible again. So disappointing, Kings.

Here are some more random things that annoyed me!
- This book felt like it stole pieces of Cell, Under the Dome, The Stand, and Storm of the Century, and then stirred it up in a vat with pro-feminist propaganda, and spat out this book.

- Supernatural "emissary" Evie, reminds me simultaneously of Randall Flagg (unlined hands and levitation and communes with animals) and Andre Linoge (in jail, brings a terrible situation and choice to a small town.)

- No mention of abortion in a book all about "women's choice", and in fact, Treeside women had no choice BUT to carry to term if they were pregnant, since there were no facilities still in operation. So, again, less choice in the "paradise".

- Clint and Lila's son Jared is 17 and way too perfect and responsible, and thus he annoyed me. Total White Knight character. No substance. Lame.

- A 12 year old girl is called "Nana", which is what toddlers call their grandmothers. WTF?

- Women in this book who try to stay awake take a shit ton of uppers, including coke and meth, and then it's just... never mentioned again. One of them uses meth pretty much nonstop for 5 days, but because MAGIC apparently doesn't have any cravings, ill side effects, addiction, or anything.

- The Kings were terrible at describing people in ways that would help the reader to understand their experiences. There are two main characters that are black, but we don't know this until WELL into the book, and yet, their blackness, especially in this area of W. Virginia, is relevant to their experiences and would help to understand them. This annoyed me.

- And finally, this: A meth-addicted, very troubled and mistreated girl cleans up when she's Treeside, and also finds out she's pregnant. This encourages her to be a better person, and to want to raise her baby right, and she even goes so far as to write him a book of life lessons that she wants him to know. She and Lila become pretty good friends Treeside. Unfortunately she dies in childbirth (convenient, because I'm convinced she'd have voted to stay given her life in the real world.). Lila then keeps her baby, which is cool, and probably what Tiffany would have wanted. However, back in Real world, Lila goes one step further, which is that she had a friend who is a doctor fake a birth certificate saying that LILA is the baby's birth mother - effectively stealing her dead friend's baby, and stealing the boy's chance at appreciating who his mother really was, and all the hopes she had for him. I think this is so cruel and heartless. To add to this, she informs Clint of it, without consulting him, and snidely tells him that he doesn't have a say. As though raising a baby is the same as installing a pool. She could have simply adopted him... it's not like anyone would question it, considering everything else going on. But to say he is her own baby, that is just wrong to me, and it was this that made me hate her character, more than all of the other ways she was shitty and horrible in the book, which were many.

Ugh... anyway. This review is way longer than I intended it to be, but I just had so many problems with it. I still don't hate it the way that I hated Mr. Mercedes, but this is definitely down there on the list. Could be worse, though, I guess. There could be a sequel. =\