The Man of My Dreams

Plot Summary
Reviews
Related Articles and Interviews

Plot Summary

Curtis Sittenfeld created a touchstone with her pitch-perfect portrayal of adolescence in her acclaimed debut novel, Prep. Her prose is as intensely realistic and compelling as ever in The Man of My Dreams, a disarmingly candid and sympathetic novel about a young woman's fantasies of family and love colliding with the challenges and realities of adult life.

Hannah Gavener is fourteen in the summer of 1991. In the magazines she reads, celebrities plan elaborate weddings; in Hannah's own life, her parents' marriage is crumbling. And somewhere in between these two extremes-just maybe-lie the answers to love's most bewildering questions. But over the next decade and a half, as she moves from Philadelphia to Boston to Albuquerque, Hannah finds that the questions become more rather than less confusing: At what point can you no longer blame your adult failures on your messed-up childhood? Is settling for someone who's not your soul mate an act of maturity or an admission of defeat? And if you move to another state for a guy who might not love you back, are you being plucky-or just pathetic?

None of the relationships in Hannah's life are without complications. There's her father, whose stubbornness Hannah realizes she's unfortunately inherited. There's her beautiful cousin, Fig, whose misbehavior alternately intrigues and irritates Hannah. There's Henry, whom Hannah first falls for in college, while he's dating Fig. And then there are the boyfriends who love her more or less than she deserves, who adore her and break her heart. By the time she's in her late twenties, Hannah has finally figured out what she wants most-but she doesn't yet know whether she'll find the courage to go after it. Full of honesty and humor, The Man of My Dreams is an unnervingly insightful and gorgeously written examination of the outside forces and personal choices that make us who we are.

Read an excerpt.

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Reviews

The New York Times Book Review
"Sittenfeld proves herself once again to be a rigorous and wily stylist. She writes clear, funny, unadorned prose, and packs her pages with clever observations without appearing to be trying. This kind of intelligent self-effacement is harder and harder to come by in new fiction...The Man of My Dreams shows us a writer who is in it for the long haul."

The Washington Post
"The Man of My Dreams is intelligent and insightful...it offers more evidence that Sittenfeld is a clear thinker, a canny observer and a solid, graceful stylist."

USA Today
"In The Man of My Dreams , Sittenfeld gets inside the man-obsessed motives that strike some women in their late teens and 20s. The result: "Dreams" could be the women's novel of the summer, the one they talk about, dissect, analyze and compare with their own experiences. In this insightful book, Sittenfeld asks: Does every woman deserve a soul mate? Modern women might cringe at a story about a young woman who, for most of this novel, is looking for the perfect man. Despite the title, "Dreams" is no frothy tale of looking for love. Hannah Gavener, Sittenfeld's protagonist, is no chick-lit chick."

The San Francisco Chronicle
"The exciting thing about Sittenfeld, aside from her remarkably lucid, incisive prose, is that she has the potential to carve out a new place, based largely on the strength of that prose, for every woman who wants to write (or read) good fiction about growing up and messing up -- just the way the boys do -- without being issued a stigma and a cutesy cover."

The Rocky Mountain News
"Sittenfeld's writing style is both literary and highly readable. The Man of My Dreams is one of those 'It's late, I should go to bed - after one more chapter' kind of books. And much of its appeal is in the way Sittenfeld's narrator views the world."

The Los Angeles Times
"Sittenfeld gets a lot about the fraught world of dating just right: the anxiety, the careful rituals, the unflagging optimism that jockeys constantly with a sense of impending doom. She shows how complicated dating can be in the postfeminist age, where the expectations are not always clear."

The Cincinnati Enquirer
"A coming-of-age story that explores dating, sex and marriage with an honesty that's as tender as it is raw. Although Hannah's quest for the ideal boyfriend has its quirks, it includes several familiar scenarios: tongue-tied encounters with older boys, drunken hookups at college parties, overzealous suitors, awkward flirtation in the workplace, and the nagging, ubiquitous presence of seemingly flawless couples. Sittenfeld's accuracy in drawing these scenes seems to be a trademark skill, one she has further honed since her well-received debut novel, Prep...A wonderfully engaging story, one that will strike a chord with any young woman who has ever hopefully cast her net in search of love."

Salon.com
"It is easy to feel close to Hannah, to feel that she is someone you have known, or have been...[Her story] is an ordinary, routine journey of divorce, remarriage, boyfriends had and lost, but Sittenfeld makes it captivating, like another family's home movies. She writes in the third person, inside Hannah's head, which turns reading into something closer to eavesdropping...Because Sittenfeld is so good at bringing Hannah to life, she is also very good at getting you to turn the pages...Sittenfeld's ear for dialogue is always sharp, and her observations can be shiver-inducing."

Vanity Fair
"Curtis Sittenfeld...has graduated from dorm-room romance to more mature musings in her latest novel, The Man of My Dreams. Heroine Hannah Gavener struggles to reconcile her childhood fantasies with the adult realities of marriage, a quest that proves desperate, if not predestined."

Elle
"Sittenfeld proceeds with her trademark martini-dry observations. The honesty of some scenes is piercing, almost heartbreaking, and this incisive vision of the path to maturity strikes home with an undeniable familiarity."

The Atlantic Monthly
"Sittenfeld [shows an] ability to evoke surprising details and fresh perspectives...[A] considerable achievement."

Time Magazine
"[Sittenfeld is] the Faulkner of awkwardness...Like Lee [in Prep, Hannah is] mesmerized, and a little paralyzed, by the tiny, glittery hypocrisies and white lies and unspoken truths that make up human interaction...Where Prep was about love and social class, Man of My Dreams is very much a book about love, love, love, but Sittenfeld shows us that there is still something fresh to say about the oldest subject in the world."

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Related Articles and Interviews

Read a Random House Q+A with Curtis about The Man of My Dreams. (4/27/06)

Read an article about Curtis in TimeOut New York. (5/4/06)

Read a profile of Curtis in Time Magazine. (5/14/06)

Read an interview of Curtis on Earthgoat, a blog by graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. (7/24/06)

Listen to a radio interview (about 10 minutes) with Curtis on Bill Thompson's "Eye on Books." (5/22/06)

Listen to a radio interview (about one hour) with Curtis on Marty Moss-Coane's "Radio Times." (6/12/06)

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