This was a weird one to read in the pandemic, not going to lie. My sleep was all messed up and reading this novel kind of echoed that weird, dystopian way of moving through the world. The idea of being a "grief hemophiliac" feels accurate in the post-pandemic world. Not her usual fare -- but not NOT her usual fare, either. Solid read, but be prepared to stay up all night or want to sleep for a week after.

Karen Russell could write anything. I think my favorite moment was the sleep donation worker and the father sleeping in the field with the sleep potion folks selling around them. Russell is so smart to zoom in on these singular characters within a mass event like this. I loved the description, or mystery I guess, of the nightmare and the lack of knowledge around if it was spread on purpose.

This book was very understated, even for this author! The subject matter is fantastic, and yet the focus and drive is definitely from the characters. I am really invested in this (fictional) problem, but mostly because I want to know "and *then* what happened?" to the characters. Bravo!

Sleep Donation is a novella about a near future, where insomniacs have become a new class of people who are dead or dying, living an eternal "Last Day". Trish, the protagonist, works every hour of the day as a recruiter for sleep donations, following the early death of her insomniac sister. These donations can give back the sleep and dreams to the sick, and even eradicate their disease entirely. One donor, "Baby A" is a universal donor, and as Trish becomes enmeshed with the family of "Baby A" things begin to spiral out of her control. This book definitely has a little bit of a pandemic feel to it, but it feels much more of an escape than a reminder. Russell world-builds effortlessly and this book hooks you in quite quickly, wondering what resolution may or may not come for these poor people. It is a novella, so it's fairly short - though I'm certain this could easily be part of a series that would be highly consumable! This doesn't come out until September, but you should absolutely put this on your 2021 To-Read list.

Trish is excellent at her job. Recruiting people to donate sleep for the growing insomnia outbreak, using the story of her own sister to get people to sign on, is something she excels at. And the company she works for says they're committed to providing dreams to those who need them.

But when Trish becomes a bit too interested in Baby A, a universal donor who's own parents are conflicted about her use, she starts to uncover some shocking information. In the midst of this, another anonymous donor has started a worse outbreak. That of a shared nightmare resulting from his own donation.

Things start to come to a head when the public becomes more and more afraid of potential nightmares and Trish becomes more and more disillusioned with her job.

What a weird little book to read during a pandemic.

Vintage rereleased this novella last month, making it available in print for the first time. They also added illustrations to this creepy and magical little tale.

Funnily enough, I read this during a bout of insomnia! Maybe that's not funny. It actually made it quite eerie to read. And as a longtime sufferer who is also a newish parent, I found myself equally sympathetic to Trish and Baby A's parents. It wasn't exactly a comfortable place to be!

And again, a weird book to read during a pandemic. Even if you don't suffer from insomnia, it's impossible not to draw parallels between our current situation and this book. And to wonder just how far you'd go for a cure...Sleep Donation is unsettling, but also quite entertaining.

Russell's writing is something I've been delving into for the first time this year. She's a truly gifted talent, blending the weird and outright paranormal with familiar themes. Her stories (that's all I've read thus far) are quirky and easy to sink into. They also haunt you long after you finish!

Sleep Donation is a riveting sci-fi novella from an author I love about a world ravaged by an insomnia plague. It’s told from the perspective of a young woman who works to recruit people to donate their sleep to insomniacs. While originally published 6 years ago, this story feels especially timely now in the time of COVID-19.

This was just ok. The premise was great and I was exited to read this story. But I felt like the plot just didn’t pan out. Kind of fizzled out in the end. Would have worked better as a longer novel with the story more detailed.

That being said the premise does hit hard with those of us who are still in lockdown.

"Which is all to say: nothing the least bit strange to us, about public psychosis."

A plague of deadly insomnia has swept across America, leaving people desperate for sleep. Slumber Corps is one of the few organizations offering a solution: donated sleep from healthy sleepers that can save lives and, at times, cure the inexplicable disease. Trish Edgewater is their number one recruiter, her sister Dori having fallen victim to one of the first waves of insomnia. It’s Trish who discovers Baby A, a universal sleep donor who may be the key to curing the epidemic once and for all. But there’s also Donor Y, a mysterious man whose dreams have infected others with horrific nightmares. Is one life worth sacrificing to save thousands? I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Trigger warnings: death/family death, child endangerment, needles, grief.

I love Karen Russell’s writing, and St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves is one of my favorite story collections ever. Her blend of fantasy and weirdness, her monstrous characters who are somehow more human than the humans, and her special gift for creating dark, uncanny settings combine to make her one of the most unique voices in current literary fiction and one of my personal favorites. However, there are few things I enjoy about her writing in Sleep Donation. The story is more straightforward science fiction than her previous stuff, and the health crisis lacks any of the familiar creeping atmosphere or strange characters. The most interesting aspects of the world-building, such as Night World with its own sleepless culture of insomniacs, are barely on the page.

I didn’t feel anything for the characters, and I’m not sure we’re meant to. Trish might be sympathetic, but she hijacks her grief to manipulate people. For a good cause? Is there a cause good enough? She doesn’t know, and I can’t tell whether we’re supposed to empathize with her. The moral quandaries of the novella–Trish’s use of her sister’s memory, Baby A, Slumber Corps itself–aren’t all that interesting or original. I actually found Baby A’s parents more relatable than Trish. That desire to help others versus the overwhelming need to keep their child safe is well played out.

The novella structure doesn’t do it any favors either. Russell has shown herself to be better at short stories than she is at novels, and my sense was that Sleep Donation either needed to be much shorter or much longer than it is. There’s little here to drag out into a hundred pages, unless she was willing to go into the kind of plot and character depth demanded by a novel. As it is, it spends a lot of time floundering in rather mundane ethical dilemmas and winding, pointless trains of thought, and then ends just when things start to get interesting. It’s a unique concept that fails to quite take off in practice.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.

Absolutely adore Karen Russell, and this novella lives up to her high standards in concept and delivery. I recommend this text for anyone who enjoys science fiction and horror crossover, and any one who watches BLACK MIRROR or THE TWILIGHT ZONE will also enjoy it.

This is a very interesting story of a time in America, and the world, when people can’t sleep. Part of the population can’t fall asleep at all, and others’ sleep is infected by nightmares, and so they choose not to sleep. And if a person does not sleep for a long enough period of time, they die.
But a major corporation has found a way to have uninfected people “donate” sleep to others in need, because sometimes just a few hours of healthy sleep will save a person’s life.
The donors must be tested to make sure that they have pure, dreamless sleep that would be helpful to those infected.
Trish’s sister, Dori, died of sleep deprivation, so Trish is now one of the main recruiters of sleep donation for Slumber Corps. But there are dark things going on behind the scenes at Slumber Corps that Trish stumbles onto. She must decide how to handle this discovery and still stay true to her sister’s memory.
And therein lies the mystery of this tale.
Sleep is so important to the human body, but is often taken for granted. Reading this book makes the reader contemplate the question “What if I could not sleep?” It is truly a scary thought and one that makes this read so compelling.

I'd like to thank NetGalley, Karen Russell, and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the advanced reader's copy in exchange for my unbiased review.

I'm so happy Karen Russell's 2014 novella Sleep Donation is getting re-releases at such an appropriate time. At a period when people are overly suspicious of each other, and hysteria reigns supreme, Sleep Donation is an oddly prescient read.

Trish Edgewater lost her sister, Dori, to terminal insomnia. As a plague of sleeplessness sweeps America, Trish uses Dori's tragic tale to persuade people to donate their sleep, and potentially save a life. Sleep is big business, and the company for which Trish works, Slumber Corps, use questionable methods to keep the sleep tanks full and the money rolling in. But Trish starts to question her part in their scheme, and discovers some very real nightmares.

Russell is a very gifted writer of short stories. With Sleep Donation, she quickly establishes a vivid, believable world, and a relatable, flawed character is Trish Edgewater. Trish is faced with some hellish choices, and genuinely believes she is doing the best she can. But none of her efforts will bring her sister back. She is mourning through a crisis, like so many people in 2020.

There are so many enjoyable elements to this novella; there's a hint of horror, a worryingly recognizable dystopia, humor, and beautiful prose. Russell has once again crafted an undeniably human story, with a welcome dash of weirdness. Readers can realistically get through Sleep Donation in one sitting, and I highly recommend they do so.

So incredibly timely, and unbelievably imaginable. This is a shorter novella, but manages to evoke real emotion and fear.

In the very near future, the United States finds itself in the throes of a rapidly spreading pandemic. By the thousands, people across the nation have been gripped paralyzing case of insomnia, which will eventually kill their bodies if the malady cannot be treated in time. Trish Edgewater, who lost her older sister in just that way, works for Slumber Corps recruiting unafflicted volunteers to donate units of their unspoiled sleep in an effort to save lives. She is very good at her job—mainly by exploiting her dead sister’s story—but becomes conflicted about the shameless sales tactics she employs as well as how some of the donations she raises are being used. When a tainted donation spreads the crisis outside of the country (to China, in fact), Trish faces a moral crisis that drives the narrative to its end.

That is the basic plot of <i>Sleep Donation</i>, Karen Russell’s novella that was first published in 2014 and then re-released in 2020. Of course, given what was going on in the world at the time, it is easy to see why it seemed like a good opportunity for a second issue of a book that originally was not as well received as some of the author’s previous work (e.g., <i>Swamplandia!</i>). However, it is also hard not to be a little cynical about such a strategy in that a story using an insomnia outbreak as its motivation is a really shaky comparison to the COVID-19 crisis that threatens the world in real time. A much better analogy to the current situation can be found in Emily St. John Mandel’s <i>Station Eleven</i>, or even Giovanni Boccaccio’s <i>The Decameron</i>, which taught us almost 700 years ago how to socially distance with style during a plague.

I did not come away from reading <i>Sleep Donation</i> with a strong opinion one way or the other, which I suppose is something of an indictment it itself. Russell is certainly a talented writer and here she has crafted the elements of a very atmospheric and haunting scenario that felt like it could actually happen. However, the book is too brief—it is really more like a longer-than-normal short story—to develop this world in a compelling way. At the same time, the language she uses is often overwrought and florid, especially to describe a state where brain function is being ground away to nothing. Beyond that, the main conflict that develops between Trish and her bosses at Slumber Corps takes far too long to play out and, when it does, the resolution is very unsatisfying. So, this is not a novel that I can recommend without reservation, despite the changing nature of our shared global experience.