My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The anonymous narrator, a slender and beautiful blonde from a wealthy WASP family, is a recent Columbia University art history graduate grappling with her personal tragedies and the pressures of societal expectations. During her senior year in college, both of her parents died—first her father from cancer, then her mother in a suicide caused by an interaction between psychiatric medications and alcohol. Now residing on Manhattan's Upper East Side and increasingly dissatisfied with her post-collegiate life, the narrator seeks out Dr. Tuttle, a psychiatrist known for her unorthodox methods. Dr. Tuttle readily prescribes a range of sleeping pills, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotic medications. The narrator, however, intends to spend as few hours awake as possible, numbing herself with a steady regimen of pills and repeatedly watching middlebrow movies on her VCR until the machine finally breaks down.
After being dismissed from her art gallery job, the narrator decides to subsist on her inheritance and unemployment benefits, embarking on a year-long quest to 'reset' her life through extensive sleep. But her "year of rest and relaxation" is regularly interrupted. Her college roommate Reva (who unabashedly envies the narrator's wealth and appearance) makes frequent unannounced visits, which the narrator allows despite her disdain for Reva's social climbing and annoyance at having to listen to Reva's problems—her own mother's terminal cancer, a frustrating affair with her married boss. The narrator is also occasionally in contact with an older boyfriend, Trevor (a banker who works in the World Trade Center), though he frequently cuts off their relationship to date women his own age, returning when one of them has dumped him or occasionally in response to the narrator's pleading.
The narrator initially makes trips out of her apartment only to a local bodega, Dr. Tuttle's office, and the Rite Aid to fill her prescriptions. But as she takes stronger and stronger medications, she begins leaving the apartment in her sleep, among other things to go to nightclubs (or so she gathers from Polaroid photographs and glitter she discovers when she awakes from her multi-day blackout). She also wakes up on a train headed toward the funeral of Reva's mother on New Year's Eve 2000. Convinced these activities—which have no appeal to the narrator in her conscious hours—are disrupting her efforts at complete rest, she decides she needs to sleep locked inside her apartment. She contacts Ping Xi, an artist represented by the gallery where she used to work, who agrees to bring her food and other necessities for four months in exchange for being allowed to make any kind of art project he wishes while she is unconscious: the only requirement is that all trace of him be gone when she wakes every three days to eat, bathe, and take another pill to put herself under again. To prepare, she empties her apartment, giving her designer clothes to the ever-covetous Reva, who has just been dumped by her boss—unaware that she is pregnant, he arranged a promotion that would transfer her out of his office and to the company's office in the World Trade Center. Reva plans to have an abortion; the narrator sleeps until June 1.
She readjusts to life slowly, spending hours over the summer of 2001 sitting in a park and refurnishing her once-expensively decorated apartment with mismatched, used furniture from Goodwill. But as she hoped, her worldview has been transformed by her rest: her contempt for Reva has evaporated and for the first time she earnestly reciprocates her friend's previously insistent declarations that "I love you", though now Reva is the one who has become distant. The narrator calls Reva once more, on her birthday in August, but Reva brushes off the call. They never speak again. On September 11, Trevor is in Barbados on his honeymoon and Reva dies in the terror attack on the World Trade Center. The narrator goes out to buy a new VCR to tape the news coverage, returning as time passes to watch the video, in particular footage of a woman leaping out of the North Tower whom she believes to be Reva.
KILLING TIME by M.C. BEATON (319 Pages)
Life is never, ever dull in Agatha Raisin's sleepy Cotswolds village! Agatha Raisin's private detective agency is working flat out on a series of burglaries which take a violent turn when a friend of Agatha's is murdered during a raid on his antiques shop. Although determined to nail the villains, Agatha still makes time to help Sir Charles Fraith prepare to stage a massive, hugely glamorous event in the grounds of his ancestral home, Barfield House. When Agatha begins to receive death threats and narrowly avoids being abducted by kidnappers, she takes advantage of a previously arranged trip to Majorca to lie low for a while. There she meets her partner, former police officer John Glass, who is now working as a dance instructor on a cruise liner. Their relationship founders over John's apparent closeness to his stage dance partner, Louise. Putting her love life on hold, Agatha heads home, having worked out who has been threatening her life. Can Agatha track down the would-be killer, nail her friend's murderers and rescue her romance with John? Everything comes to a climax at the Barfield Extravaganza when on top of everything else, Agatha also manages to solve a 400-year-old Cotswold murder mystery!
Hessa is an Eangi: a warrior priestess of the Goddess of War, with the power to turn an enemy's bones to dust with a scream. Banished for disobeying her goddess's command to murder a traveller, she prays for forgiveness alone on a mountainside.
While she is gone, raiders raze her village and obliterate the Eangi priesthood. Grieving and alone, Hessa - the last Eangi - must find the traveller, atone for her weakness and secure her place with her loved ones in the High Halls. As clans from the north and legionaries from the south tear through her homeland, slaughtering everyone in their path, Hessa strives to win back her goddess' favour.
Beset by zealot soldiers, deceitful gods, and newly-awakened demons at every turn, Hessa burns her path towards redemption and revenge. But her journey reveals a harrowing truth: the gods are dying and the High Halls of the afterlife are fading. Soon Hessa's trust in her goddess weakens with every unheeded prayer.
Thrust into a battle between the gods of the Old World and the New, Hessa realizes there is far more on the line than securing a life beyond her own death. Bigger, older powers slumber beneath the surface of her world. And they're about to wake up.
(Synopsis taken from Goodreads)
This is an exciting, original, well-built fantasy with a female main character and no romance to speak of. The world is ever so slightly Viking inspired, in that we have a warrior culture that believes their ferocity is a way to please their gods. The religion-based culture is fascinating, and the story is action packed. I really enjoyed this!
A Demon's Guide to Wooing a Witch by Sarah Hawley -- 432 pages
