Lorelle Skellie

Unlikely to calm the mind for sleep

Revisado: 09-08-21

I like the premise of this anthology of short stories- they work like parables with the characters’ dialogue pointing the listener to a message that reinforces the author’s ideas of what mental disciplines can settle the mind to combat insomnia. My chief criticism is that several of the stories describe violence in gruesome detail, glorify substance abuse, paint female characters as the subjects needing to be taught messages of truth delivered from the male characters, and depict frightened children living in a household where domestic abuse is taking place. After listening to 3 of the least offensive stories and skipping 5, I am “closing the book” for good. There is a place for literature that explores these themes; in a collection of bedtime stories billed as a way to relax the mind and prepare for restful sleep, this does not work well for people with any level of trauma in their background, and statistically, people with trauma are more likely than most to suffer from insomnia and therefore reaching out for a book like this. If at the beginning of each story, a genre was given or a “trigger warning: descriptions of violence” or “trigger warning: substance abuse,” that would help- those for whom the material would be upsetting could skip to the next story. Truthfully though, the stories are not written well. It read like a translation done by a translator that wasn’t very highly skilled. Either way, the sentence structure was characterized by grammatical errors and word choices that weren’t “quite right”, to the point that it was distracting and made following some plot points a little muddy. Overall, I like the premise of the book, and the performance by the narrator was adequate especially considering what he had to work with. Unfortunately the use of triggering/upsetting storylines in bedtime stories without a head’s up that a given story is potentially problematic for some listeners, and the poor quality of the writing, offsets the good parts in my opinion.

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