Rating: 
Summary: Arresting
Review: What is so true about Michael Cunningham's novel is that it deals with much-written about, over-the-top issues (AIDS, "the bored housewife," suicide), binds together 3 distinct eras, & through amazing characterizations, creates a moving & memorable novel. The fragile portraits of people in a 1990s NYC aristocratic society, the world of author Virginia Woolf, & 1950s suburbia is all too tragically similar. A beautiful ode to womanhood, literature & humanity--one of the best reads of the decade.
Rating: 
Summary: Take time to stop and read the sentences...
Review: This book was engrossing because of the author's use of language. He describes three situations simultaneously from three distinct time periods, and manages to eloquently capture the different emotions stirring in each character. Despite the author's use of language, I felt that three stars was appropriate for this book because of the overall lack of plot and character development.
Rating: 
Summary: More intellectually than emotionally stimulating
Review: This is a work of creative genius in which leitmotifs of Virginia Woolf's works weave their melody in a new composition that helps the reader understand what Woolf was driving at--how we are haunted by our past and its turning points and moments of great promise, the books we read, how others may see us represented in fiction and how we respond to that, to yearning for what we can't have or what we threw away in a moment. Sexuality has been inverted from the heterosexual world Woolf lived in where to be gay was exciting and romantic, to the world of 90's New York where homosexuality itself has slipped into conventionality and bourgeois manners, but the problems are still the same: "There's so little love in the world," one of the gay characters realizes ultimately.What keeps the work from being great is the fact that it's perhaps a little too clever for its own good, and its hard to get around the contrivance to actually care about these self-absorbed characters. Only the character of Virginia Woolf as Cunningham depicts her seems fully human and not just artifice. Still the book is very thought-provoking and makes a wonderful focus for a book group discussion. Although it is relatively short and easy to read, it is packed with provocative ideas and a few surprises.
Rating: 
Summary: The Hours
Review: I didn't find this book engrossing or even challenging. In fact, it was an effort for me to finish reading this rather smallish book. I found the writing to be superficial and the characters undeveloped. Of course, the connections among the three women were obvious and there were no surprises to be discovered. Anyone familiar with the Bloomsbury Group and specifically Virginia Woolf is aware of everything included concerning her life and her writing. The similarities among the three characters were so tenuous and the characters so underdeveloped (I felt no attachment to any of them), that although I am aware of the rave reviews, I find it impossible to agree with them. If this is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, then our writing establishment, and our civilization by extension, are in deep trouble.
Rating:
Summary: An April day in print
Review: Cunningham's "The Hours" is a luminous mesmerizing piece, aloft and afloat like Poe's "dream within a dream." The narrative deftly slips from the mentally-fragile Virginia Woolf (away from bright complex confusion of London for a suburban "cure" in the 20's while formulating "Mrs. Dalloway") to Laura (whose marriage in the sun-splintered vividness of 50's LA suddenly becomes a prismatic entrapment) to Clarissa (a publisher w/in artful NYC in the AIDS-decimated 90's.) This triptych is a remarkably readable measure of the mundane's depths and heights as we move through a single day in these three women's lives. Echoic motifs reverberate throughout, including "a room (and/or time and space) of one's own," the need for exquisite moments to perfect one's creation, yellow roses, a hovering presence just out of peripheral sight, the nearness of death within life, a spontaneous trip crowding the day's duties, a taboo kiss between women, and sanity coming undone in the bright brash confusions of the respective modern lives --to name but several. However, the power is in the telling here, the use of language as a medium for slipping into these streams of consciousness and their respective milieus. Read it on a spring afternoon, or create that sense by reading it anytime.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting and unforgettable
Review: I finished this book a few days ago and the words are still with me as I write this. This book moved me in so many ways. I had to stop several tinmes and catch my breath to let the words sink in. Of course Cunningham is no Virginia Woolf, he wasn't trying to be. This is simply a homage to a wonderful novel (Mrs. Dalloway) and how it affected three womens'lives. As the three women reflect on the course of their lives, the missteps, the things that might have happened had they taken a different path...it filled me with sadness and with hope as well. While others have commented on the pacing of this novel and the loads of details, each woman's story takes place in the span of a single day. They are contemplating suicide, so details like these fill those hours. If a book ever deserved a Pulitzer Prize, it's this one.
Rating:
Summary: inspirational
Review: After reading this book i was compelled to read more about Virginia Wolf and more about traditional and contemproary femenism. I was impressed that this book was written by a man. My only contention with the book is that every women in the book had a lesbian preference, as if to say that most women when they really look inside themselves will have a lesbian feeling. untrue. But overall i found the book readable and most enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: A well-wrought urn
Review: This is a book to savor for its craftsmanship and its startlingly simple, and at the same time, profound observations. The language ripples across the page and across time, mirroring the complexities of the book which inspired it. I was moved so many times; it is a book which I am sure I will re-visit.
Rating:
Summary: Who are Laura and Richie?
Review: This is such a clever book. I loved the way the characters are molded after the characters in Mrs. Dalloway. I believe the characters of Richie and Laura are also a reference to the Laura and Richie characters on the old Dick Van Dyke show. This is perfect irony. The Laura and Richie in the book are striving to be the perfect Laura and Richie of TV land but real life intrudes as it does for everyone in this wonderful book. END
Rating:
Summary: mawkish, devoid of content, full of overblown language
Review: Virginia Woolf he is not. This novel is loaded with overblown language, the worst over-the-top sort of sentimentality, and is just plainly and blatantly full of itself. Worst of all, there is no content to speak of. Nothing. The language is the opposite of dense. It is so full of air that it threatens to blow away, and many times while I was reading I wished that it would. It resembles most closely, not Virginia Woolf (that champion of beautiful language and observation) but rather a college freshman intent on showing off how good he is at writing. In all honesty it is the worst literary book I have ever read, and probably the worst book of any kind that I have ever read. I'm glad it's over. Good riddance. And how this book could win any award is unfathomable, unless it was because it rode Virginia Woolf's coattails and made the appropriate bows and scrapes to topical issues.
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