Review: An intriguing concept doesn't quite take off
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 26, 2014
Today an automatic update from Amazon arrived that fixed the formatting problems with "Sleep Donation". So, here's my content review.Some reviewers say this is science fiction, but don't look for a tight, Crichton-like techno-thriller. It's fantasy or magical realism instead. Call it dream-like.The story is set in America of the near future and concerns an epidemic of pathological insomnia, so serious that people actually die from lack of sleep. A national foundation called The Slumber Corps exists to harvest sleep from the healthy and transfuse their dreams into the sleepless.Two brothers, Jim and Rudy Storch, run a major branch of the Corps. Their star recruiter, Trish Edgewater, narrates the story. Trish's sister was one of the first to die from sleeplessness, and her agonizing grief makes her pleas to donors irresistible.From the beginning, The Slumber Corps seems a bit of a smelly racket. The central story is Trish's growing disenchantment as she uncovers the dark side of both the Corps and the smarmy Storch brothers.Two sub-stories add to the tension. One involves "Baby A", an infant whose sleep is so pure it can actually cure insomniacs but whose father opposes sleep donation. The other involves the virulent nightmares of "Donor Y", nightmares so terrible that those infected sometimes choose to kill themselves rather than sleep.I'm afraid the story never came together for me. The characters are thin, the stories of "Baby A" and "Donor Y" are left hanging, and the last page ends so abruptly I wondered if the download got cut off. This is not to say that Karen Russell is not one of the finest writers around today. But I have the feeling she pushed this out as a Kindle Single because it doesn't quite measure up to her usual work.* * *Original Review:One StarWhat's up with the weird formatting on this?I love Karen Russell. "Swamplandia!" is one of the best books I read last year, and "Girls Raised by Wolves" is fantastic. But "Sleep Donation" has unreadable tiny print. Yes, I can enlarge it if I go up 4 sizes, but then every other book is unreadable. Is it unreasonable to expect that if I pay $3.99 for a Kindle Short, somebody, somewhere ought to have checked how it actually looks on the Kindle?