The Hours by Michael Cunningham

I give this book 3 stars!

Description: The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to.

This book is part of my Pulitzer challenge.  The writing is great to the point that it is just too much.  You have long flowing paragraphs filled with description after description.  None of it's really necessary.  The story was intriguing, and the last 40 pages or so kept me reading until the end.  But take away the fluff, and what you have is a completely mediocre book.