Rating: 
Summary: Verbose, Pale Story
Review: The Hours was a very fluffy, full of adjective story about next to nothing. Perhaps Cunningham wants to show us how we can be connected, but I found that the ties were weak. And although detail is always good, we are not in the day of Flaubert's work, and the run on sentences were a bit much at times. Did we really need every single detail of Clarissa buying flowers? At times I began wondering if we were given all the minutae to help fill the pages. The most intriguing of all characters is Laura, a housewife who just wants time to herself. Virginia was there to be the common thread, but we do not see her at her craziest, or or most interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Woman fate, in different time
Review: Very touching story. A good use of a literal reference to connect stories of women in different ages. All of them are trying their best to chase the dream, love and so on. It's much better than the movie!
Rating: 
Summary: Human Nature
Review: Does anyone remember what Ayn Rand said in the Fountain Head? In her book there is a character that writes a poorly written, no plotted, ridiculous book. Some how it is published, and all of NYC and beyond go wild for it in social settings. However, no one actually believes it to be a good book, they are all just too afraid that they'll show some weakness or defect within themselves if they admit to its lack of anything stimulating. This is the only reasonable explanation for Michael Cunningham's The Hours. I can not fathom why anyone would think this to be a good book, unless of course they are just caught up in the hype and too afraid to untangle themselves. I feared that this book I had purchased would be passed down and fall into the wrong hands causing someone to spiral down into a pit of despair. So immediately upon finishing it, I closed the cover, took a deep breath, walked over to the woodstove and threw it in. Something I'd never done before or since.
Rating:
Summary: Deeply touching. elegantly written
Review: This book is lovely. It truly looks into the depths of human darkness and light in the context of relationships, time, and many other factors. I've read it twice and only enjoyed it more the second time.
Rating:
Summary: A fulcrum of a novel
Review: THE HOURS, Michael Cunningham's riff on Virginia Woolf's envelope-pushing novel MRS. DALLOWAY, is a pretty stunning piece of work in its own right.
Filled with razor-sharp observation and devastating emotional interconnectedness, THE HOURS is a stunning odyssey through a day in the lives of three women, and by extrapolation, every woman and every human being. It would be impossible to read this book and not find little bits and pieces of yourself strewn across its pages.
What's really amazing is that Cunningham is able to stick so close to the themes, structure, and characterization of Woolf's novel, while managing to build, out of seemingly the same pieces, a story all his own. What THE HOURS does so well is reveal to us the binding emotional ties that unite us all. It makes you see the similarities in ostensibly different lives, different dreams, and different words. Cunningham manages to create a perfectly balanced fulcrum on which a large teeter totter of metaphors is able to swing up and down in powerful arcs.
Rating: 
Summary: like sampling many fine liqueurs, but much more as well
Review: These stories intertwine in a wonderful and very moving way. The writing is simply beautiful, the tone perfectly expresses the tug between inspiration and the bleakness of everyday life. Though as a novel it seems disjointed, the whole thing comes together marvelously at the end, in a very surprising and moving way. It actually made my cry a little, yet feel wonder at the possibilities of life even as we experience so much pain. Not many novels can do this much, particularly contemporary ones. Warmly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Better than the original
Review: While I found "Mrs. Dalloway" enjoyable, and it does help to read it before reading "The Hours," I thought this book was more enjoyable, easier to read, yet just as deep and complex. I loved how the lives of the three women wove together; it made perfect sense at the end. This book really explores why we live, whether live is meaningful, and how we find meaning in it. I think this book is destined to become as much of a classic as the Virginia Woolf novel on which it is based.
Rating:
Summary: More than the eye can see
Review: Michael Cunningham sensitively describes the lives of women. He also sympathetically takes us into the minds of homosexual people, making us wonder, and then making us see. His flowers, furniture, artefacts - even his cake - are believable. His smells are credible, and his textures. This is a book written with three protagonists of equal importance, and yet, one is seen as being the fulcum, the raison d'etre of the whole work. Without Virginia Woolf, there would have been no Mrs Brown. Without Mrs Brown, there would have been no Richard. Without Richard, Clarissa's role in the story is meaningless. This is a clever way to build a book. It is also a clever way to give modern readers an insight into what it meant to be a writer in the 1930s; what it meant to be gay or a lesbian at other times apart from the present. It gives one a yen to find out - if one has not already - what "Mrs Dalloway" is all about. What novels of the 30s were like. Virginia Woolf's trials and tribulations were very real. At the outset and the end of writing a novel, she would experience hellish episodes any novelist would relate to! She was creating a watershed, and it took its toll. Novel writing has never been the same since she created her protagonists all those years ago.
She actually made them think confused thoughts: made them vacillate, wonder, crave different things at different times, so at variance with how readers were used to thinking characters should behave. Characters hardly thought before - they rarely experienced ambiguity of any kind, let alone sexual. Michael Cunningham takes Woolf's groundbreaking ways and how they affected her, and pulls them three ways, joining them together when we all finally realise who Richard is. After he slips off the edge, we find out who he really is. Yes, real people question themselves. Yes, real people find themselves withdrawing from those they love. Yes, real people do vacillate, buy flowers for the wrong people and for the wrong reasons. Yes, real people do note the colour of the finger food they eat at things like book launches and award parties. Yes, real people try to top themselves and fail, ending up outliving all the ones who displeased, enraged or enthralled them.
It's not such a hard book to believe. Still, I wonder whether I would have liked a more dramatic ending. And perhaps it is rather demanding of the reader to present a set of characters all of whom are to a greater or lesser extent homosexual. But it is a premise one decides to accept after the first 30 pages. It is a view into the lives of THESE characters, the ones the author has chosen to show us, in these hours. "The Hours" is just that... the space of a day into which are crowded the fortunes, reasons, motives and lots, of a bunch of women. Not just three. See this book through the eyes of Sally, or Julia, and you have "The Years."
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, perfect
Review: "The Hours" is an incredible book. If you are up for it, try reading Virginia Woolfe's "Mrs. Dalloway" first. It is not an easy read, but it's a short one and even if you dont make it all the way through I think it really adds a lot to "The Hours" to understand the parallels Cunningham draws between his own story and Woolfe's.
Rating:
Summary: Virginia, Laura, Clarissa
Review: Quite simply, The Hours is a masterpiece. It carefully, slowly, weaves together the stories of three women in three times. There's Virginia Woolf, who, in 1920-something, is beginning to form the plot of and write Mrs Dalloway. In the early 1950's we meet Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife who doesn't understand why she's suffocating in her sunny Los Angeles home. And then, in 2002 or so, Clarissa Vaughan realises that she's based most of her life on something that might not always be there: a poet who's been afflicted with AIDS for years. The book leads you through one day in the life of these women (an homage to Mrs Dalloway taking place in a single day). The beginning entranced me, with its beautiful, yet subtle, graceful writing and the unusual starkness of the characters. Indeed, they don't seem like characters at all, but people you've known casually for many years, and you've just discovered that their lives aren't at all what they appear. There are several encounters with minor characters which should clutter the streamlined storytelling, but instead seem to complete the entire figure of the main characters and wrap the book into a whole. The book is wordy and very thoughtful, but every phrase feels necessary to contribute to the full view of the story. And by the end of the novel, the lives of the women have become meaningful, honest, and utterly real. It's a haunting journey through events that become all too familiar.
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