These Dreams

With her unique talent for rendering the texture and tone of contemporary American life with confident strokes and images both familiar and striking, Barbara Chepaitis has crafted a wonderful follow-up to her heralded debut, Feeding Christine. If anyone asked--not that anyone ever bothered to, of course--Cricket Thompson would have said she lived a perfectly ordinary life. She lives in a tidy little town in upstate New York with her husband and two teenage daughters. Cricket passes each day in a haze of habit and dreams, running on automatic pilot. Content? Sure--just not particularly engaged or alive. Some people believe there is a single moment in life when something happens that is so pivotal, so jarring, that it fundamentally changes us. For Cricket, the single moment happens in the grocery store. Suddenly, she somehow knows that the world has been altered. It is not until she gets home that she can fill in the blanks of her nightmare: One of her daughters has disappeared. An uncommonly empathic family portrait shot through with beauty and sadness, These Dreams is about the devastation of loss, about the falling away of all that is dear, and about the possibility for growth and rebirth, even in the most desolate of landscapes.Chepaitis, Barbara is the author of 'These Dreams' with ISBN 9780743437509 and ISBN 0743437500.