Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious; saving grace is that it's so short
Review: A friend recommended this book, and I think he was trying to impress his girlfriend by having read it. Pretentious, flowery writing swamps a thin storyline. The saving grace is a neat little narrative tie-in towards the end. This is the kind of novel that wins awards because it deals with 'important' subjects - homosexuality, suicide, AIDS, etc. Thinking back on how I had to endure reading this for my book club, I'm going to scale my rating to a 1.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazingly intuitive yet disturbing
Review: Michael Cunningham is an amazingly intuitive, poetic writer who is somehow able to tap into our deepest doubts and emotions and weave this interesting interconnected tale. I found this book profound and heavy and sometimes too much to handle emotionally. I saw parts of myself in it that I'd just as soon be rid of but are parts of all of us, nevertheless. I feel deeper for having read it and would recommend it highly. Just don't let it get you too down and have a light back-up book just in case you need a diversion! This book has made a lasting impression on me. I don't think I will ever forget it.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious but interesting
Review: The writer tries a little too hard to prove he's a good writer, and nothing turns me off more than unnecessary grandeur in writing. At least the interwoven stories are interesting, though the connection between the present day Clarissa and post-war Mrs. Brown is so obvious, it's not much of a surprise at the end.
Rating:
Summary: Three stories of female angst.
Review: Michael Cunningham, in his book "The Hours," depicts three women who are going through similar crises in their lives. One is the troubled and talented author, Virginia Woolf. Woolf's recurrent episodes of madness are so frightening and disturbing to her that she finally resorts to suicide by drowning. The second woman is Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife who lives in California after World War II with her husband and her three-year-old boy. Laura is not content. Every day on earth is a torment to her. One of her few comforts is being by herself and reading Virginia Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway". Laura cannot see herself surviving day after dreary day as a housewife and mother into the distant future. Laura contemplates her options. Should she kill herself or run away? The third woman is Clarissa Vaughan, an editor living in Greenwich village. One of Clarissa's oldest friends, Richard, is dying of AIDS. Richard has called Clarissa "Mrs. Dalloway" for years. As she watches Richard waste away, Clarissa begins to take stock of her own life. Clarissa lives with her female lover and their daughter. However, Clarissa often feels disconnected from her loved ones, and she is sometimes overwhelmed by her life. All three of these heroines are persistently and painfully introspective. No part of their lives is unexamined and this close scrunity of every aspect of their existence brings these women more pain than enlightenment. Although I admire Cunningham's ability to write with subtley and grace, and although I sympathize with the plight of women who feel out of step with the world, I did not enjoy "The Hours". I found it too dark and devoid of hope, a novel that emphasizes the most negative aspects of being a woman.
Rating: 
Summary: Guts
Review: The Hours is gutsy. By using segments of Woolf?s Mrs. Dalloway as the headers to his chapters Cunningham dares to set himself up alongside Virginia Woolf as an author of equivalent skill and voice. The segments of text from Mrs. Dalloway not only serve to remind the reader of the context of the book and set the tone of the novel (which he admirably emulates and extends), but also provide a foundation off of which he can leap into the work, as if saying ?look at me! See how well I can write?? In most cases this would be presumptuous and ineffective, but, to Cunningham?s credit, he pulls it off. His work is not only as strong in voice as Woolf?s, but equally, if not more, intelligent and layered. From recreating Clarissa Dalloway?s world in Woolf?s inspiration to a biting analysis of post-war and modern-ay lifestyles, he forces the reader to tackle everything that Woolf put forth in her work, as well as throwing modern-day drama into the mix. We are drawn into an unerringly and deceptively flat world with a veneer of peaceful domesticity and shepherded by characters on a lovely jaunt through various flower-shops of Western civilization. Jumping into the text is far more than the ?lark and plunge? that Clarissa sarcastically imagines. Weaving together a multitude of trends and references throughout the text, Cunningham takes what appears to be a previously explored unidimensional them and builds upon it to create a thoroughly engaging, deeply and bitingly intelligent work that requires and merits the reader?s full attention all the way through. A definite winner.
Rating:
Summary: A lucidly-written, ploddingly-plotless solipsism
Review: The author spins melifluous prose around increasingly episodic longueurs, captured by the author's own reflection on p. 130: "You're in perfect agreement with almost every critic. That'd waited all that time, and for what? More than nine hundred pages of flirtation, really, with a suddent death at the end. People did say it was beautifully written." This book is a only 200 hundred pages, but midway begins to feel like the 1000-page book the author adumbrates, presciently describing what I suspect he thought others would say about *this book.
Rating:
Summary: An updated review....
Review: Maybe the readers who don't like this book were in a hurry...this book requires, almost demands, to be read slowly, deliberately, and not in one sitting. I've not found a book in recent time that held my attention and drew me into the story more than this one. I read it after hearing a piece on NPR...and I've passed my copy on to friends who have also enjoyed the wonderfully crafted prose. Although there are three separate stories going at one time, I never felt disjointed or disrupted during the shifts. I've even re-read the book three times and will read it again...it's that good. If you can get beyond some of the negative reviews, and if you can give yourself time to absorb the Cunningham's glorious prose, you just might find a gem of a story just waiting to be unearthed. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Wonderful!
Review: I picked this book because it won a Pulitzer. What a beautifully crafted story: part biography, part fiction, part mystery, part ode. Each character's story is engrossing in and of itself, and what a clever way to tie them together at the end. I've been practically demanding that others read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Imbued with a love of life
Review: This is an absolutely brilliant book! Days after finishing it I still feel full of its glow, its love of life. My literature group first read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and I would highly recommend that anyone considering reading The Hours first read Mrs. Dalloway. The way Cunningham uses the various characters, scenes, and "things" (e.g. pears, a necklace, flowers) in Mrs. Dalloway adds a richness, a continual reverberation to the reading experience. He uses some very differently, although often they are parallel, and they would nearly always surprise me -- Mm, here's this strange fascination with pears! or Oh! Buying these shirts after lunch is just like buying the necklace!... He delves into the soul of Virginia Woolf herself, writing her own novel. He remakes her characters of Clarissa, Sally, and Richard in light of modern sexual mores. And he honours Woolf by showing how one of her readers, Laura Brown, will go to great lengths to absorb herself in reading Mrs. Dalloway. That said, Cunningham certainly makes The Hours a complete novel unto itself (I think! I can't completely imagine reading it on its own.) The plot is entirely unique in its amazing construction, and the ending is totally unpredictable. The intertwining of the 3 main characters, Virginia Woolf in the '20s, Laura Brown in the '50s and Clarissa in the '90s, adds some insightful historical perspectives of how women's lives have changed throughout the century. I think Cunningham's greatest feat with The Hours, however, is the love of life with which he imbues it. He helps us understand the importance of savouring the immense beauty that each moment, each hour, each day, has to offer -- despite tragedies and pain and suffering. The last few pages absolutely glow with this love of life. I've been left with the lingering warmth and happiness of this book for days and days.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best written books I've ever read.
Review: Being a reader who appreciates everything from Jane Austen to Pat Conroy to Janet Evanovich, I can still unoquivocally say that this is one of the best, most elegantly written books I've ever read. Each of his sentences seems to be a novel in itself. Even with my limited Virginia Woolf experience, I was still able to and understand what was going on in this book. You don't need to read Mrs. Dalloway in order to appreciate what the author is so expertly doing with his narrative, but it does enrich the experience. And though the novel deals with many heavy subjects, such as AIDS and suicide, I never felt the weight of them holding the story down. This book is not to be missed.
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