Sleeping Beauties is a timely discussion about gender and the differences between men and women, wrapped up in Stephen King's trademark shocking violence and horror.
The catalyst for the events in the book is a strange event: When women fall asleep, they become cocooned in a substance like a spider web.
As with so many King books, it's a slow build to the craziness that is sure to ensue when half the population falls ill to the sleeping sickness the world eventually calls Aurora, after the heroine of "Sleeping Beauty."
The way society breaks down when 50 per cent of the population essentially goes missing is fascinating to watch, and reminds me a lot of King's classic The Stand.
The gender debate
Gender has been an area of hot debate in North America for some time now, so I commend authors Stephen King and Owen King for writing about such a divisive topic.
For the most part, they take a humanist approach to the topic of gender, clearly showing that people are people and neither gender is better than the other, only different in some regards.
But there is an overall theme that men are more violent than women and wouldn't be able to run society without the other half. The resulting chaos of that premise makes for an exciting story, but I don't know that I agree with the sentiment.
700 pages, 72 characters
Gender politics aside, this is a good read. You could enjoy the whole story without worrying once about what the message is saying about the world.
It's an incredibly long book, though, clocking in at 700 pages, and there are a dizzying number of characters to keep track of -- 72 characters, who are listed at the beginning of the book with a short description.
I actually only referenced the lengthy character list once, though. The characters all have distinct voices and storylines, so I didn't have much trouble telling them apart.
Does skin colour matter?
The crazy number of characters may have been part of the reason why I didn't know three of the characters were black until the middle of the book, and found out another character was black at the very end of the book.
For the most part, the characters' skin colour didn't change the story -- until it did because of racism. I tried to flip back in the book to see if skin colour was mentioned, but it's a bit of a challenge due to the size of the book and the number of characters.
Did the authors purposely obfuscate the skin colour, or did I just miss it? If someone else has read the book and knows, I'd be curious to hear!
Father and son collaboration
A book with two authors is an interesting quirk, and that the authors are father and son is doubly interesting, but it didn't change the story for me. If I'd read the book not knowing it had two authors, I would have never known.
The book reads very much like other Stephen King books I've read, which makes me curious to read some of Owen King's solo work. Is his writing much like his father's? Is Stephen King trying to position his son as the heir to his storytelling empire? I didn't even know Stephen King had a who writes, but now I'll be looking out for his name.
What did you think?
Have you read Sleeping Beauties? Were you aware of the gender politics behind the book, or did you just enjoy the story? Did you know Jeannette, and Frank and his family were black from the beginning? Does it even matter what their skin colour is?
I haven’t read it, but I am a book cover photographer so I am always keeping my eye on covers as the are released, and I have always loved this one ☝️
That's a unique specialization for your photography! Very cool! I love judging books by their covers, haha! Though as a web designer, I'm more into the typography.
Typography is just as important as the image, on a cover...actually more so. Lots covers don't even have imagery, ONLY the typography. My personal favorite though is when the typography interacts with the image...I saw a cover once where an octopus tentacle was reaching up out of a bathtub and wrapped around one of the letters in the title. I tried to find it but couldn't.
Oh, very nice review. I've read thee Kings so far and they were ok for me, but I didn't really enjoy them. But this one is interesting. Due to my job I'm deep into this gender subject.
There was also a huge discussion, when J.K Rowling told her fans, that some of her characters in Harry Potter are gay or have a dark skin color. This wasn't mentioned in the book and some people where very angry. But who the hell cares?
Like all of King's books, this one is very violent and graphic at times, which can be hard to read, but I find that action is what makes the stories exciting.
I agree that it shouldn't matter if characters are gay or have a dark skin colour, but in this case the story is set in rural America (the Appalachians), where racism is still a pretty big issue. If they did purposely leave out the skin colour until later in the story, it would have been an interesting decision to make because of the context.
Also, there's the issue of imagining a character one way for most of the book, and then having to revise the image in your mind, which is a bit jarring.
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