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Summary
Summary
In her most spellbinding novel yet, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni spins a fresh, enchanting story of transformation that is as lyrical as it is dramatic. Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others, to foresee and guide them through their fates. This gift of vision fascinates Rakhi but also isolates her from her mother's past in India and the dream world she inhabits, and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her own painful secret, Rakhi's solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which begin to open the long-closed door to her past. As Rakhi attempts to divine her identity, knowing little of India but drawn inexorably into a sometimes painful history she is only just discovering, her life is shaken by new horrors. In the wake of September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new love and understanding for her family. "A dream is a telegram from the hidden world," Rakhi's mother writes in her journals. In lush and elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream, one that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, and from which readers will be reluctant to wake.
Author Notes
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in India and later moved to the United States to attend college. She earned a M. A. at Wright State University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Divakaruni held many odd jobs until she was able to become an accomplished writer. She was the president of MAITRI, a crisis hotline for female South Asian victims of domestic abuse, and is currently a professor at Foothill College in California.
Her works have been recognized in more than 50 magazines and 30 anthologies. She also has been awarded two PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and the Allen Ginsberg Poerty Prize. Divakaruni's books include Arranged Marriage and The Mistress of Spices. Her Title One Amazing Thing made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spiked with elements of mystery, suspense and the supernatural, Divakaruni's sixth novel is a pleasantly atypical tale of self-discovery. Rakhi, a single mother and struggling artist living in Berkeley, Calif., has always been vaguely aware of her own mother's unusual gift the ability to interpret dreams. Between juggling a laundry list of other priorities keeping her floundering tea shop afloat after a Starbucks-esque supercafe moves in across the street, battling her ex-husband for their daughter's affections, finding her artistic voice Rakhi longs to know more about her mother's past and her own hazy Indian heritage. After a mysterious car accident claims her mother's life, Rakhi, with her father's help, sets out to decipher Mrs. Gupta's dream journals in hopes of unlocking the secrets of her peculiar double life. A shadowy man in white who appears at pivotal moments, a sinister rival and entries from Mrs. Gupta's dream journals all punctuate this cleverly imagined tale of love, forgiveness and new beginnings. Meanwhile, September 11 disrupts Rakhi's search for identity, and a vicious attack on her friends and family calls their notions of citizenship into question. Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices; Sister of My Heart; etc.) does a good job working current issues into the novel and avoids synthetic characterization, creating a free-flowing story that will captivate readers. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Sept. 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Poet and novelist Divakaruni (The Conch Bearer, 2003, etc.) stirs up a tasty curry that's half-mystery, half-fantasy in a clever tale of a young woman trying to sort out the mystery of her mother's death--and life. Having a clairvoyant mother can be a pain, but not always. Berkeley artist Rakhi Gupta is going through all the usual thirtysomething traumas of family and career--her first gallery exhibition is due to open soon, her coffeehouse is being undersold by a Starbucks-like competitor, her loathsome ex-husband is constantly dropping in to see their daughter--and she's getting desperate enough to do the worst thing a grown girl can do: turn to her mother for help. Mrs. Gupta is an India-born "dream reader" who has developed a select following in California for her ability to interpret her clients' nocturnal fantasies ("A dream of milk means you are about to fall ill"). Rakhi wants to sound her out on a few worries of her own, but before she has the chance her mother is killed in a car accident. Rakhi's father, who survives the crash, tells her that just before the accident her mother seemed to be pursuing someone in a mysterious black car. Creepy enough--and now Rakhi's six-year-old daughter Jona is becoming more and more insistent that her imaginary friend Elaina isn't imaginary at all. A childhood fantasy--or a more complicated grown-up one? Somehow, Rakhi feels that the answers lie in her mother's dream notebooks, which her father has agreed to translate for her. As a record of the hidden world of her clients and herself, Mrs. Gupta's notebooks unlocked the door to many mysteries during her lifetime. Perhaps they'll do so once more now that she is dead. Richly textured and artfully told through the varied perspectives of believable characters. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Divakaruni's socially and psychologically precise fiction always possesses a mystical dimension, whether overtly, as in The Mistress of Spices0 (1996), or poetically, as in The Vine of Desire 0 (2001), a beguiling and inspiriting trait she shares with Alice Hoffman, albeit from a Hindu perspective. Now Divakaruni's signature fusion of the realistic and the cosmic achieves a new intensity in her most riveting and politically searing novel to date. Rakhi, a California-born painter, knows nothing of her parents' Indian past. Living hand-to-mouth in Berkeley with her daughter, Jona, after a painful divorce, Rakhi and a friend run a homey little tea- and coffeehouse that comes under siege when a Starbucks-like franchise opens across the street. But more traumatic ordeals await, including the wrenching revelation of the truth about Rakhi's enigmatic mother: she was a dream teller, compelled to interpret other people's dreams whether they asked her to or not. As Divakaruni alternates between passages in Rakhi's mother's spellbinding "Dream Journals" and the story of Rakhi's high-wire life, long-hidden aspects of the temperaments and talents of Rakhi's father and ex-husband come to light, as does the fact that Jona may have inherited her grandmother's gift, and burden. But just as the tea shop finds new life as an informal community center, the horrors of 9/11 detonate, placing Rakhi and her circle, including a turbaned Sikh, in danger as anger, fear, and prejudice instigate violence. Writing, as always, with wit and lyricism, Divakaruni masterfully illuminates the tangible and the numinous, the abruptly changing present and the deep past in a page-turner lush with emotional, cultural, and spiritual insights. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Protagonist Rakhi is no queen (actually, she's a divorced artist mom). But she is struggling to understand her deceased mother's dream journals. Meanwhile, her own dreams are floundering as she and her Indian friends are attacked as terrorists after 9/11. From the popular author of Mistress of Spices. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.