My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Sleep. Most psychiatrists would propose engagement with others as a way to deal with alienation, and many patients would consider that path. The young female protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel titled, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, chooses another way to deal with her situation: sleep. I laughed at the ways in which she gets her very strange psychiatrist to prescribe loads of pills to help her sleep. The prose is so finely written and the narrative so perfectly crafted that despite the sleeping, there is a high energy maintained throughout the novel. When there are just a handful of pages left to read, we are snapped out of our own drugged state as Moshfegh delivers a perfect ending. Rating: Five-star (I love it) Click here to purchase My Year of Rest and Relaxation from amazon.com.