Reviews

The Shapes of Sleep by J.B. Priestley

ivy_pirate's review against another edition

3.0

Hi enjoyed a fair amount of this book and had no trouble reading 50 pages or so in one sitting. The dialogue, characters and description were all quite interesting and reasonably original. However, the whole mystery itself, once revealed, is honestly quite disappointing. Not only is it entirely unbelievable, but for all the murky characters involved, you might think Priestley could have made the conspiracy run a little deeper! I also think I missed a lot of the theme of "women as the saviour of men" that ran through the book, since the last line and closing sentiment of the novel appeared to come out of nowhere! But perhaps that's because with all the surrounding 60s prejudice I found it hard to identify a clear cut modern version of a feminist thread running through the book.
Overall, an interesting charity-shop book read, and I'm glad I'm a bit more familiar with Priestley outside "An Inspector Calls", but there's no chance of me returning to this book.