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Title: Woke Up Lonely

Author: Fiona Maazel

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-04-13

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC

Ratings: 2.5 of 5 out of 8 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness. With its communes and speed-dating, mixers and confession sessions, the Helix has become a national phenomenon - and attracted the attention of governments worldwide. But Thurlow, camped out in his Cincinnati headquarters, is lonely - for his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter, whom he hasn't seen in 10 years. Esme, for her part, is a covert agent who has spent her life spying on Thurlow, mostly to protect him from the law. Now, with her superiors demanding results, she recruits four misfits to botch a reconnaissance mission in Cincinnati. But when Thurlow takes them hostage, he ignites a siege of the Helix House that will change all their lives forever.

Critic Reviews:

"Fiona Maazel's new novel won't take no for an answer - it grabbed me from page one and didn't let me come up for air until the last page; I really think I may have bruised my ribs from laughing." (Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!)

"No one does loneliness, self-abasement, and dread like Fiona Mazel. And maybe no one other than George Saunders illuminates with as much sadness and comic brio the grotesqueness of the extent to which we fall short - as citizens, as family members, and as individuals - of who we imagine ourselves to be." (Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad)

"Fiona Maazel's imagination is so wild - wild being an under-observed variety of honesty - that you feel like you've woken up into one of those rare novels as real as life. Hooray for such a talent!" (Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances)

Members Reviews:

Woke Up Lonely

Not usually my cup of tea, but the positive reviews intrigued me. I'm glad they did. It took a bit to get into but worth it. A new take on the human condition, it is irreverent not knee-slapping hilarious. The characters are fully developed. Vocabulary not a problem.

If you'd enjoy serious, kookie, fun, depressing, hopeful and clever, get this novel.

Writer Gets in the Way of the Story

I have mixed feelings about this novel. The premise is good: a cult leader, an ex-wife in American intelligence, 4 lonely, lost people looking for promise in a dismal world. The characters are interesting. And in many ways the story worked well for me. I like stories with flawed characters and the hope of redemption. But the writer is in love with her knowledge of the vocabulary, to the point where my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary could not identify nor define many of the terms she uses. In addition, the plot jumps about with little or no transitions from one subplot to another. Each of those jumps is hard to follow.

"In which no one is happy but everyone tries."

I cannot resist an organization whose charter is bringing the lonely together. The Helix is the political child of thurlow Dan who mesmerizes his followers into pursuing connection to each other, settling them in communes of relationship. He is pursued by his ex - wife Esme from the Department of the Interior who in fact tries to protect him from her position of power.

So the writing is wry, sarcastic, and sincere. I admit I spent the first portion of the book fighting the tonal change and doing a bit of confusion keeping track of the characters. One only has to surrender to the writing as it flows.