I Am This Character

I stayed up until 2 am on Tuesday... yes, on a school night! Why? Because I could not put this book down. I kept thinking "I'll just read another chapter...and then another...and then another..." But I could not sleep until I knew how this fantastic book, and its terrifically flawed main character's story, ended.

The Man of My Dreams is the follow-up to Curtis Sittenfeld's debut, Prep, which I loved. So I was excited to pick up this new one, though I had no idea how much this novel would resonate with me.

The book is the story of Hannah Gavener, tracking her life from ages 14 to 28 through her major interactions with men - her father, her crushes, her boyfriends, her friends' boyfriends, the ones that got away the ones she should have let go. This is not a teeny-bop chick-lit story, as Hannah is difficult, and insecure, and judgmental, and bitter, and scared...and ultimately her collected experiences enable her to become a whole person and embrace what the world has to offer.

Like in Prep, Sittenfeld's writing is often devastatingly honest and true. Check out this passage, as Sittenfeld sets up Hannah's quiet social life -- it made me shudder when I read it myself:

...she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, ...she thinks in a lot of ways it was useful. Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah's observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises, when they do occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you live under the shelter of some benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.

Part of why I could not stop reading this story is because I could relate to everything Hannah went through and all of her hopes and fears -- this was the rare story that invites you to relive your *own* coming of age moments as you follow our heroine's fits and starts. Nearly every stage of Hannah's life echoed some prominent memory I called up from my own past. "Watching" her make the same mistakes I did was strange, because seeing what could almost be your own life pass by on the page can be somewhat unsettling as you revisit all of those "should've" moments from the past. I had several "this is your life" flashes while turning those pages in the wee hours of the morning.

A well-written story, with a believable and familiar main character, that helps you look at your own life in a new way? What more you could you ask for in a good paperback?