Hi everyone, I am so excited to be writing this book review for My Year Of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh was an exciting book. I switched back and forth from the physical book to the audible version narrated by Julia Whelan, and I took my time reading the novel.
Reading this novel, i feel that we know someone that resembles the narrator. We don’t know who narrates the story, but we know that she’s a young woman moving around New York and wants to take time off from life. The narrator has a great job, a fantastic loft apartment, and a great friend named Reva. I liked that we got a glimpse into the lives of Reva as she has her issues. The narrator decides to take a year then off, and we see her journey of being prescribed drugs by her therapist and pretty much deciding to ignore her issues. We get all the names of the medicines she’s on, and the kicker is she doesn’t need them and wants them to go to sleep and not be aware of her surrounding.
The transition that Ottessa gives the reader is flashbacks from her childhood with her parents and her journey in new york with Reva. Dr.Tuttle is another compelling character because she’s a therapist who wants to please the narrator and shouldn’t be practicing medicine, which makes this novel intriguing.The reader then sees how she treats Reva and abuses the drugs given to her by Tuttle, and we get why she’s the way she is. The narrator is distant, Monotonious sarcastic, judgemental, and has issues with intimacy. that reason is because of her parents. We see how the narrator has depression, and she wants nothing but to get help with it. She doesn’t go about it the right way, but she explains that she was raised not to show emotion, and she never knew what love from her parent. Later in her life, her depression alteed her lives in adulthood. The narrator’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend Trevor ( who’s a Womanizer and toxic) and her wanting more in their relationship makes this relatable, as we all may have been in that situation with an ex.
The narrator in this story was funny, but she had her flaws. I love how she has an obsession with Whoopi Goldberg. I did laugh when she talked about wanting to be with Whoopi and sleeping with her, and i found Ottessa’s thought on that funny in the book. The narrator has a fascination with her, but Whoppi’s movies made the narrator content with life, and it was one of the things that brought her happiness. The fact that the narrator chose to go back to society towards the end, but her neglection of Reva eventually led to her realization that she was better keeping Reva in her life. She was there for Reva in her time of need, but in the end, the narrator’s ending to her story was something i didn’t see coming. I liked this book because the story came with comedy, self-discovery, and we see the narrator’s journey with combating depression. We never know what a person is going through and if we all know a friend who doesn’t seem to be themselves, always ask if they are fine and never give up on being there for them. Ottessa’s novel was a great read, and it seems as though the reader was reading a journal entry by how each sentence started in another space in time. The narrator, herself, seems to have it all. She’s blonde, rich, and beautiful, but her ambition in life is all screwed up. I bet we all wish we could take a year off to do nothing but sleep, and in the end, it’s unrealistic. Fiction is another universe made up of great stories, and this book was an odd book at that. I loved how Ottessa gave us a novel that made us think about life, and there was a mystery behind the narrator, and the ending made my heart drop, and i think that was what Ottessa wanted for her readers.
Please leave a comment about what you thought about the book. If i missed anything, let me know. This thread is meant to have discussions, and thank you for reading my latest post. have a wonderful week ahead!
A Spirited Panda Blog 