ENTERTAINMENT REALM

Sleep Donation by Karen Russell. Publisher: Atavist Books (March 25, 2014). Contemporary fiction. ebook. 110 pages. ISBN13: 9781937894283

“And goodness knows, I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, love.”

Inventive. Fantastical. An imagining of a Dystopian future where brokers deal in sleep as our greatest commodity. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori became one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia [“she died awake, after twenty days, eleven hours, and fourteen minutes without sleep. Locked flightlessly inside her skull.”], has worked for seven years recruiting sleep donors for Slumber Corps. Its mission: get healthy dreamers to donate sleep to insomniacs. Trish begins to question the organization when she meets the first universal sleep donor, “Baby A,” [“multiple tests confirmed that their sleep had zero impurities: there were no nightmare-markers, no nature dream-antibodies. Not need, whatsoever for the sleep of Baby A to be sieved and purified and reconstituted.”] and the mysterious “Donor Y” who wreaks havoc on sleep worldwide. Slightly confusing at times but with Karen Russell’s outstanding writing and inventiveness it’s an unusual novella.

RATING: ***/5

–review by Amy Steele

FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Net Galley.

purchase at Amazon: Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single)