• Have you read Sittenfeld's books? Share a review, comment or question.

Many times I just choose not to read the books on the best seller lists or those being reviewed in the popular magazines. I’ve always felt that one of the things I could offer readers is news of books they might not otherwise discover. So, having not even read Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s highly praised first novel, it was highly unlikely that I would even bother with her second novel, coming as it did less than two years after the first one. But once I started Man of My Dreams, I was so charmed by the narrative voice that I barely put the novel down to eat, drink, fly, talk, or sleep.


We meet the narrator, Hannah Gavener, when she’s 14, at the time her mother has just decided to stand up to her controlling and unpredictable father. (Throughout the novel she has much to say about the results of growing up in a dysfunctional household, for example: “Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you...you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence." I think anyone who’s ever lived with a father like Hannah’s will understand the truth of that statement.) We follow Hannah through her four years of college and beyond, watching as she struggles to figure out what it is she wants and who, exactly she is, since it’s clear she’s not her beautiful and intelligent older sister, or her boy-crazy, wildly attractive cousin, Fig. Why is she so dissatisfied with Mike, a young man who adores her? Why hold herself so aloof from her classmates and would-be dates, and why does she so deliberately, it sometimes seems, remain basically the same lonely, self-doubting 14-year-old she was at fourteen? There’s no satisfyingly complete resolution when the book ends. Hannah does seem to be making some strides toward self acceptance and knowledge. And she seems reasonably happy. Can we ask any more from life for her or for ourselves? Sittenfeld might well say, no. I think I would, too. And now I have to go back and read Prep, I suppose.