Product Description

“Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate you, which, in Hannah’s observation, is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into adulthood.”–from The Man of My Dreams

In her acclaimed debut novel, Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld created a touchstone with her pitch-perfect portrayal of adolescence. Her prose is as intensely realistic and compelling as ever in The Man of My Dreams, a disarmingly candid and sympathetic novel about the collision of a young woman’s fantasies of family and love 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 complicated: 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; her gorgeous cousin, Fig, whose misbehavior alternately intrigues and irritates Hannah; Henry, whom Hannah first falls for in college, while he’s dating Fig; and the boyfriends who love her more or less than she deserves, who adore her or 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 beautifully written examination of the outside forces and personal choices that make us who we are.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #583672 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-16
• Released on: 2006-05-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Sittenfeld's poignant if generic follow-up to her bestselling debut, Prep, similarly tracks a young woman's coming-of-age, but rather than navigating an elite school's nasty and brutish social system, this time the narrator contends with a dysfunctional family and her own yearnings for love. Fourteen-year-old Hannah Gavener is abruptly shipped off from Philadelphia to live with her aunt in Pittsburgh when her mercurial, vindictive father breaks up his marriage and family, which includes Hannah's older sister, Allison, and their browbeaten mother. Sweet but insecure and passive, Hannah had "been raised... not to be accommodated but to accommodate," an upbringing that hobbles all her subsequent relationships. The novel follows Hannah through her teens and late 20s (from 1991 to 2005), as she searches for romantic fulfillment, navigates friendships (e.g., with her larger-than-life cousin Fig) and alternately tries to reconcile with her father and distance herself from him. But the most influential connection Hannah makes is with her psychiatrist, Dr. Lewin, whom she begins seeing her freshman year at Tufts. Although the novel aspires to be taken seriously and Hannah is a sympathetic protagonist, she remains a textbook case of a young woman who wants "a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Sittenfeld's second novel features a heroine, Hannah, much like the one in her widely praised début, "Prep": an outsider who casts a critical eye on her peers. Here, though, the class cues that pervaded the boarding-school milieu of "Prep" are largely absent, as Hannah's turbulent relationships with men mark her navigation into adult life and she wittily dissects the ways in which those around her entice and discourage the opposite sex. Sittenfeld has a brisk narrative style and a rare ability to turn nearly alienating flaws into vulnerability, but her central characters, despite their acute observations of others, have no introspective faculty at all. The final chapter, written as a letter from Hannah to her former psychiatrist—and perhaps intended to temper the conventional happy ending that would place this novel squarely in the "chick lit" category—is disastrously clunky.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine
Prep (**** Mar/Apr 2005), Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel, explored a girl's coming-of-age at an elite high school. The Man of My Dreams contains the same intelligence and insight into teenage (and 20-something) life, but critics generally agree that, despite its superb writing, it's a less powerful novel. Supporters praise Sittenfeld's ability to delve deep inside the "outsider" mind and reveal the pain of intimacy and desire. Detractors cite stock characters, a hackneyed plot about personal growth, and a hokey ending. "The legions of readers who loved Prep will most likely not flock to this quiet novel," writes the New York Times Book Review. "But Sittenfeld's determined exploration of her character's interior life feels like bravery."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Another Complex and Interesting Protagonist
The wonderfully misleading thing I found about this book as well as 'Prep' was that you think it's just another fluffy coming of age story complete with a wry, sarcastic narrator who always has some witty, glib comment to make while achieving a rich and deserving fictional happiness.How far this is from the truth. Sittenfeld carves out young Hannah Gavener's quest for her prince charming and happily ever after with a blunt end of sobering reality. Not afraid of embuing Hannah with some ugly characteristics makes her so much more identifiable, and consequently sympathetic and relatable. Sittenfeld is a terrific writer, and most importantly one that continues to not be afraid to present people as they really are without a concern for what anyone thinks.

A Strong Effort, a Good Book, But Don't Expect it on any Year-End lists
When your first book is as amazing as Prep, your second book had better be great. Readers have high expectations. We know what we can rightfully expect.

Curtis Sittenfeld, unlike a lot of young writers with one successful novel on the shelves, didn't fail her audience with The Man of My Dreams. The story follows Hannah from childhood through adulthood, in and out of relationships as she struggles to find a way to be happy and comfortable and true.

The writing is wonderful, capturing the moods of a bad camping trip, of being trapped in a car with a bullying father, of the ambivalence a woman feels with a too-doting lover. Hannah rings very true to life; there is nothing exaggerated or false.

The writing and character developments may be great, but the book feels very much like a short-story collection, like a variation on Melissa Bank and her latest book The Wonder Spot. This isn't a failure, but it's a surprise. A reader could rightfully expect something more original from Sittenfeld, something more profound.

Being pleasantly entertained is wonderful, but one hopes that Sittenfeld reaches a little out of her comfort zone for her next book.

It would be great if she could channel the writing into something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Sophomore Jinx?
I mostly enjoyed reading this novel and got through it quickly, but started liking it less almost the minute I finished it. The format was very "Prep" like, what with the skipping over from one time period to the next. However, whereas this device worked well in "Prep," perhaps because time was gated by the beginning and ending of four years of school, here I found it abrupt and jarring. If anything it left too much to be filled in by the imagination. I almost had the sense the book (and writing) were rushed to capitalize on the success of "Prep" so that the author did not become another "Donna Tartt." The last chapter, in particular, seemed like a cheap way out and was overwrought IMO.

Ms. Sittenfeld is an excellent writer and I hope that in her next outing she tackles a different theme ("Dreams" was essentially a carbon copy of "Prep", thematically) and that she follows a more traditional, linear format just to see if she can pull it off.