When She Sleeps Book

Two years after the fall of Saigon, half-sisters Lucy and Mai, find one another in the world of dreams. Left behind with her mother and grandmother in the newly renamed Ho Chi Minh City, Mai is the Amerasian child of a former U.S. Army surgeon and Linh, a Vietnamese linguist, whose passion for language can't rescue her from an encroaching mental illness. Bereft of her father, Mai lays claim to what she believes is rightfully hers—her mother's memories of the doctor, locked away in Linh's dreams, stealing them away, and sending them out into the night to her sister. Lucy is the doctor's West Coast daughter by his American wife, a teenager who finds a haven from her parents' secrets in the photographs she transforms into dreamscapes. Like an image slowly surfacing in her darkroom, Lucy finds herself mystically transported to the sister she's never met, slowly dreaming the lush landscape of her father's infidelity. Just as blood flows between sisters, "so too dreams can stream from one person to another, make a journey, like a basket down a river, for someone else to find," explains Mai's grandmother, as the deepening bond between Mai and Lucy slowly erodes the physical divide between them.

Library Journal

Krygier's second novel brings together two half-sisters: Lucy, born to a surgeon named Aaron and his Californian wife, Evelyn; and Mai, born to Aaron and Linh, a Vietnamese linguist he met while working in Vietnam during the war. Through Linh's dreams, Mai learns about the relationship between her father and mother-and about the half-sister she has never known. When Mai is found by her father, she travels with him to California to meet his family. This novel is hard to encapsulate owing to its fragmented structure, but it uses the dualities of light and dark, dreaming and waking, and East and West to remarkable ends. The horror and disruption of war, never discussed directly, are instead made evident in the actions and interactions of the characters. A good literary look at the Vietnam War, this brings together the Vietnamese and the American perspective through the lens of divided families; given its approach, women may enjoy it more than men. For libraries where there is an interest in literary perceptions of war.-Amy Ford, St. Mary's Cty. Lib., Lexington Park, MD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.