Rating: 
Summary: Not Believable
Review: I am shocked that this book won a Pulitzer and that it was then thought to be worthy material for a movie starring some of the best in the business. I found the book to be extremely boring, abundant in flowery prose and lacking substance. Why are Clarissa and Richard life long friends? Why is Laura so depressed with her "perfect life"? Oh, that's right because she secretly longs for a lesbian affair, after her lingering kiss on the lips of an possibly dieing neighbor. Nothing about Laura's life would indicate she should be suicidal. Maybe that is the deeper meaning of the book.....your life doesn't have to be "bad" for you to want to end it. Obviously a man wrote this because I don't know any woman who would leave a three year old they adore unless their life was beyond horrible. After reading this book you would think that all women have lesbian tendencies. On top of that the book is written in a highly confusing style (it must be that I'm just not schooled enough to appreciate the way he creatively ties the three woman's lives together at the end). The worst part of the book is that it is sad and depressing, but you have not been coaxed into caring about the characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Think of it as a piece of music....
Review: Fans of straightforward story-writing might be frustrated by Michael Cunningham's book, which swirls back and forth between modern New York, 1950's California, and late Edwardian England like a whirlpool. But its emotional effect is powerful and it is worth an effort.I found it had a profound impact on me once I started reading it as though I were listening to a piece of music. Themes rise to the surface, submerge, and reappear (purchasing flowers; a kiss shared between two women; a life-threatening illness; an interrupted attempt to run away from one's life; a suicide reconsidered)-just as in music. Let it wash over you rather than analyze it, and you will be well rewarded.
Rating:
Summary: Parallel triple tale matches Wolfe's Dalloway
Review: What a lovely curiosity of ladies, decades apart, yet connected by the concept of the hours of life. Having read Wolfe's Mrs. Dalloway certainly helps stir one's interest in Cunningham's work. But the triple story of three separate women in three separate time segments of the 20th century make for a bit of suspense as the chapters layer one another with individual revelations. If you are planning on seeing the Oscar nominated actors in the film version, do yourself a favor and first read the book. And once finished with Cunningham's book, go back and read Mrs. Dalloway. There is genuine appreciation of writer conception and craft when one absorbs all three. Well worth the hours spent!
Rating: 
Summary: The hours that live on...
Review: Michael Cunningham did a great job researching and writing about Virginia Woolf and of course, some imagination went in there as to how Woolf was feeling at the time of writing her great novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and dying.
Here, we get three different stories of true emotions, each heartfelt in its own way, combined into a cohesive novel that will have you in tears a couple of times before the end.
The link here is Viginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway". Virginia Woolf, an author troubled by by own insanity in Richmond (early 1920s) is in the midst of writing her book, Mrs Dalloway. Choosing between living in Richmond and death, Virginia Woolf will finally succumb to the voices in her head by drowning herself. As she questioned her existence, life and love for her husband, Virginia put part of herself in the book she was writing. Almost 30 years later, a lonely housewife, Laura Brown in Los Angeles (195o's) picks up the book for a read and questions her own life and feelings. It looked as if her life was perfect, a loving husband, a son and an unborn coming their way. It was her husband's birthday and she wa going to make a cake. She made one and another. Her best friend, Kathy, came for a visit with bad news and both parted with a kiss, a kiss that transcended time, gender and emotions. Laura chose to leave her family while the impact on her son, Richard, was so devastating in years to come. In modern day 90's New York City, a gay woman, Clarissa Vaughn being nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by her dying AIDS friend, Richard (Laura's grown-up son), questioned her own existence and priorities when Richard re-ascertained his love for her before leaping to his death. In this well-executed novel, feeling is operative here. In a complex web of life, love and relationships, one day in the life of three women in different times was to be so life-altering. Absolutely smashing.
Rating:
Summary: Poignant
Review: To those who suffer from mortal sickness (don't we all?) depicted from the last page of my favourite "The Hours" (not the movie): "We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows (poor Leslie); more die by accident (US bombing), or devoured by some disease (SARS), or if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seems, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city (Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hong Kong, Taipei, Kerala or even Kuala Lumpur), the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."
Rating:
Summary: The Hours Is Worth The Time
Review: I found this like-new book hidden between the beaten-up volumes of a rummage sale. I didn't know at the time that The Hours would be released as a hyped-up movie. With performances by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, the film has been nominated for eleven Oscars. The novel takes its roots from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, a 1925 novel that recently hit the best-seller lists again. Woolf chronicles a single day in the life of the title character. That's exactly what the author of The Hours does, times three: He recounts a day in the lives of three women. Strangely, the Michael Cunningham (who won the Pulitzer Prize for this work) dedicates 226 pages solely to women. Anyone who reads this book should run through the extra couple hundred pages of Mrs. Dalloway, because Woolf's work forms the basis of The Hours. At first I questioned the merit of a novel that takes its inspiration from another, but Cunnigham's colorful prose and masterful plot converted me. Virginia Woolf steps onto the stage first in the act of suicide. This short scene highlights the theme of the novel: the struggle with depression and isolation. One minor character expresses the loneliness of the whole novel in two sentences: "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another." Perhaps that's why Cunningham (and Woolf) limited their stories to a single day to show how treacherous those hours are. The reader watches as Woolf (as portrayed by Cunningham in The Hours) agonizes over her work-in-progress, which the reader will soon recognize as Mrs. Dalloway. In the next chapter Cunningham takes us to a woman living in today's bustling mess of New York City; her nickname is "Mrs. Dalloway." Her story turns out to be a contorted version of Woolf's actual book: Names are reused but identities switched. Next, the author transports the reader back the 1950s American suburbia. Mrs. Brown, a humble housewife who ought to be happy, tries to escape from her insipid life by reading Mrs. Dalloway. Later, she literally does escape from her family, abandoning her son. Cunningham later reveals (in a clever linkage of the past and the present) that the abandoned son is now Mrs. Dalloway's friend who uttered the lines above. Cunningham fuses distant eras in this conglomeration of concise chapters. His writing kept me reading for hours straight just as The Lovely Bones did, but avoided clichéd phrases and plots. This isn't a morbid account of depression, but a document of a thirst for life, a "new day in which anything might happen, anything at all."
Rating:
Summary: Very good.
Review: The hours was a very interesting read, as it takes you back and forward, fiction and non fiction. it's realy a one of kind book. the characters are finely expressed. it's amazing how can one day tell as all what we need to know about a person. Read it it's worth it, the movie is good too.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but read the real thing too...
Review: I liked this book but don't feel that he really brought the story, or characters together at the end, he didn't manage to finish the book off well. What I appreciate this book for, is leading me on the read 'the original' Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, which is a far superior read.
Rating:
Summary: --Unique story--
Review: THE HOURS was a little hard to follow and at times I had to reread some of the passages to see if I had missed some key point. There are three central characters and each chapter is about one of the three women. Virginia Woolf was by far the most intriguing of the characters and of course she was a real person. I didn't find the other two women to be sympathetic as people. Clarissa Vaughn seemed to be living in the past and Laura Brown was a woman who didn't want to face real life and lived in a world of the books that she read. I was constantly trying to find the link between the main characters, and of course some things are finally revealed at the end of the story. Since THE HOURS was based on Virginia Woolf's book, MRS. DALLOWAY I really wish that I had read that story first. Michael Cunningham has written a very unique and original book, but I have to admit that I didn't like the story and thought it was rather depressing. I don't think that I'll see the movie.
Rating:
Summary: "There are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead."
Review: "I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters," Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1923 diary; "I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment." Readers of Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS will experience the same type of connections in his characters' development. Cunningham's deeply moving novel tells three parallel stories, which eventually intersect at page 217. He begins his novel "on a day early in the Second World War" with Woolf's 1941 suicide (p. 8), before returning to the writer completing her novel, MRS. DALLOWAY, in 1923 London. Cunningham then shifts seamlessly forward to 1990's New York City, where he introduces us to 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan shopping for flowers in Greenwich Village for her dying friend, Richard's party, and then again to 1949 Los Angeles, where he introduces us to Laura Brown "trying to lose herself" (p. 37) from her perfect life. In the course of THE HOURS, all three women undergo subtle but profound transformations. Each of them realizes that there is only this for consolation: "an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more" (p. 225). After finishing THE HOURS, many readers will undoubtedly want to add MRS. DALLOWAY to their reading list. G. Merritt
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