Pros: well-written; good characterization; a quick, smooth and engaging read
Cons: some plot points
The Bottom Line: Engaging story beautifully-written. Blends the metaphysical and mysterious (spiced with a dash of suspense) into a contemporary and believable setting.
jc_hall's Full Review: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Queen Of Dreams
Rakhi is an artist and a single mom living and working in Berkeley, California. Her life is fully divided between her painting, her job as a coffee-shop co-owner, and sharing custody of her 6-year-old daughter with the husband she separated from for some unspecified reason. She has unresolved issues with her parents, first generation Indian immigrants who, unlike most other immigrant parents, have never spoken much of their life in India. From an early age, Rakhi knows that her mother is a dream-teller, an interpreter of dreams whose responsibilities to her clients are deep and onerous. Rakhi yearns to be like her mother, but the talent eludes her.
When her mother dies in a strange and tragic car accident, Rakhi is left with little more than her mother’s dream journals. As they’re written in Bengali, Rakhi requires her father’s help to translate them. And so begins a slow and painstaking process that brings together estranged father and daughter, and reveals to Rakhi what her mother had kept hidden about her life and youth in India—her past as a student of mystic teachers, her rift with them when she defied all and sundry to marry Rakhi’s father, her desolation when she came to the New World and discovered she may have lost her special ability, and her reason for having excluded Rakhi from her confidence.
Meanwhile, the events of September 11 bring into sharp focus for Rakhi and her second generation Indian friends their tenuous hold on the concept of belonging in a country where many tolerate and few embrace, when goodwill and sheer common sense are wiped out in a stroke and the colour of their skin appears to dictate their immediate fate.
Rakhi is a flawed protagonist, quick-tempered and overly sensitive, and as such is utterly believable, especially in her interactions with her daughter. Her mother, too, is well-developed and very believable, and even Mr Gupta comes into his own further on into the story. Similarly, other supporting characters are well-drawn, except perhaps for the manager of a competing coffee-shop who’s rather two-dimensionally evil and wicked.
Chapters from Rakhi’s mother’s dream journals intersperse chapters on Rakhi’s life throughout much of the book, plunging the reader from West to East, from present-day America into the India of a generation past, from the conventional into the supernatural, the mundane into the mystic. Transitions are handled well, and the quality of the prose in the dream journals is sometimes lush and evocative.
Here’s how the book starts, the first entry from the Dream Journals: Last night the snake came to me….He was more beautiful than I remembered. His plated green skin shone like rainwater on banana plants in the garden plot we used to tend behind the dream caves.
Even within the other chapters, small gems of metaphors can be found. For instance, when Rakhi’s father offers to translate the dream journals, he says, “I can help you read them.” The words hang in front of her, gossamer-winged as a fishing lure. “If you want.”
I also enjoyed the details of Rakhi’s art. She’s thinking of green. Deep-forest green, gold-gray green, green tinged with the foggy silver of dawn, edged with the brittle brown of time passing….She’s thinking of the colors she will have to mix in order to re-create that green, colors that are not green at all.
While there is much to like about this novel, some reviewers have expressed frustration over the supposed singularity of theme within the author’s body of works. Since this is the first of the author’s novels I’ve read, it doesn’t bother me. Others have complained about too-neat resolutions, coincidence and happenstance. But the author does make the point that coincidences and accidents may not be as they appear. In fact, the final resolution hints at the protagonist arriving at a transcendental moment of understanding about the interconnectedness of all things.
I’m less happy with the lack of explanation re the stranger in white and the car that may have caused her mother’s death, and especially the reversal of her attitude towards her husband, considering how it hinges on a possible misunderstanding that does not even rate a confrontation. But then the author seems invested in a happy ending, and forgiveness and hope appear to be the final watchwords in this engaging novel that blends the metaphysical and mysterious (spiced with a dash of suspense) into a conventional and believable setting.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of bestselling novels: The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire; prize-winning story collections: Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives; four acclaimed volumes of poetry and two books for young readers: The Conch Bearer (first in a trilogy) and Neela: Victory Song.
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