These Dreams
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"What would you do if you were going to live your life as if you only had a year to live?"
When a stranger poses this question in the supermarket checkout line, Cricket Thompson is jolted out of her everyday life to face a startling revelation: after seventeen years of marriage to solid, reliable Jim, and despite her love for her teenage daughters, Janis and Grace, Cricket is lonely. The tides of change are pulling her toward something new and barely recognizableŠan internal shift that leads her to spend time with a man named Pass Christian, who offers her a special kind of acceptance and understanding.
But in a single moment, Cricket's world comes crashing down when an act of deadly violence erupts at the local shopping mall -- and she faces a devastating, heartbreaking loss. Through the prism of this surreal crisis, Cricket's life path is irrevocably altered; without her knowledge or consent, she has been plunged into the kind of cataclysmic event that by its very nature forces transformation. For Cricket, the world of dreams and fantasy comes up against the sting of reality with relentless force. Life as she knew it has been left in the past; yet Jim refuses to acknowledge the changes that confront them both. And suddenly, for Cricket, the love that Pass has to offer just about overwhelms her....
Exploring the solace of dreams and the fragility of being wide awake, Barbara Chepaitis has written an astoundingly powerful and heartwrenching novel.
These Dreams beautifully portrays the love that grows in the most desolate of circumstances, when even the very will to endure is challenged by the inexplicable design of the world we must live in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heartfelt and moving, though undermined by competing themes and unrealistic plot twists, this ambitious novel charts the unraveling of an ordinary middle-class family in the wake of tragedy. After a long day at work, high school secretary Cricket Thompson stops at the local supermarket near her home in upstate New York. While standing in line, Cricket ruminates on her near perfect life with two healthy teenage daughters and an uncomplaining husband: "She needed nothing, and if she wanted more, it was just because she sometimes forgot how much she had." Unfortunately everything is about to change. The very next day, an unknown gunman goes on a rampage at the local shopping mall, killing 11 teens and seriously wounding many more, including Cricket's younger daughter, Grace, leaving her in a coma and near death. Her frightened husband is unable to give Cricket the emotional support she craves, and her elder daughter, Janis, withdraws into herself. Meanwhile, Pass the uncommonly handsome man who runs the local bird sanctuary where Cricket volunteers makes it clear that he's in love with her. Not surprisingly, as Cricket's world falls apart, she turns to Pass for solace. Though the novel takes some awkward turns and goes on longer than it should, Chepaitis endows her characters with genuinely human warmth, and her challenging contemporary themes make the story more interesting than the average romance.
