|
Two years after the fall of Saigon, half-sisters Lucy and Mai find one another in the world of dreams. Mai is the Amerasian child of a former U.S. Army surgeon and a Vietnamese linguist. In the chaos of the American evacuation, Linh and her child were left behind.
Bereft of a father, Mai lays claim to what she believes is rightfully hers - her mother's memories of the doctor, locked away in dreams. She steals them away, and sends them out into the night to her half-sister Lucy, the doctor's West Coast daughter by his American wife. A teenager who escapes from her parents' secrets into her darkroom and the photographs she transforms into dreamscapes, gradually Lucy finds herself mystically transported to the half-sister she's never met, dreaming the lush landscape of her father's infidelity.
In prose as uncompromising and sinewy as that of Faulkner, Leora Krygier's When She Sleeps is vibrant with poetic sensuousness. She traces Mai's real and nocturnal wanderings from Saigon to Paris, and on to LA - which her mother had so desperately tried to reach. The sisters' dreams implode as Krygier's linguistic spell carries us to the riveting finale.
About the Author
 Praised for her "linguistic spell" and "poetic prose," Leora Krygier's novel First the Raven was published in 2002. Krygier was a finalist in the Ernest Hemingway Competition, the James Fellowship and the Faulkner Writing Competition. A lawyer and a writer for the Los Angeles
Daily Journal, she has also been profiled in the Los Angeles Times for her innovative use of essay writing in her work with the Los Angeles Superior Court. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
Author's Website
"Beautiful. Krygier has a perfect sense of place, relationships, and emotions. I was pulled in to the lives of the two sisters, from the first page to last."
- Bob Stone, author of Confessions of a Civil Servant.
"Krygier has penned that rarest of literary jewels, imaginative literary fiction. When She Sleeps is truly the stuff dreams are made of."
- Carolyn Howard Johnson, author of This is the Place and Harkening.
"A gorgeous, engrossing novel. Krygier paints a dream landscape, weaving two cultures and creating one language."
- Adele Scheele, Ph.D., author of Career Strategies for Working Women.
"Leora Krygier is a talented author who brilliantly and seamlessly weaves together fantasy and reality. When She Sleeps, a story of two half-sisters, products of war-torn Vietnam, is told with compassion, sensitivity and understanding."
- Naomi Rosenblatt, author of Wrestling with Angels. What Genesis Teaches Us About Our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality and Personal Relationships.
"Krygier has been compared to Faulkner, and the moving prose of this title shows why. It's a tragic tale, and it's a serious subject but Krygier gives it a gossamer quality that makes us want to live in her character's dreams, only to rivet us with a desperate end. Few authors can pull off that trick."
- Bradford Pilcher, literary editor, Jewsweek.
| |
The Critics Praise:
"A lyrical gem of a novel, about dreams and like a dream. Krygier enchants and entraps the reader in a universe of entangled families and entangled emotions."
- Andrew Nagorski, author of Last Stop Vienna
"Krygier's clear prose brings close the drama of survival, the weight of it, "of those left to sweep up what is left when war is done."
- Booklist
"Elegant.... Krygier portrays the tentative steps by which two young women discover and come to terms with their identities."
- Kirkus Reviews
"An engaging, lyrical, dreamlike duet between two complex young women, one a Californian, the other Vietnamese, whose lives are connected through love and history, and a single man, their mutual father. Their intricate, often dangerous relationships with their mothers, the women who shared him, are traced with fierce insight and quiet delicacy."
- Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander.
|
