What is The Cure For Dreaming?

The Cure For Dreaming

by Cat Winters

Consider this: what if you could tell a person’s true nature just by his appearance?  Emotional vampires would present with fangs and a ghastly pallor; feeble, miserable individuals flicker in and out of existence.  Cat Winters’s The Cure For Dreaming explores this question and more in her latest historical fiction novel set in Portland, Oregon, in the year 1900.  The daughter of a cruel dentist, Olivia Mead is called onto stage at a show to be hypnotized by the young, yet famous, Henri Reverie.   Her furious father enlists Reverie’s help to browbeat Olivia into her proper role as a woman, forcing her to “see the world the way it truly is.”  When Olivia realizes she cannot voice her dissent, and that she can truly see peoples’ natures, she must take her future into her own hands with the help of Reverie – all set within the backdrop of a dynamic suffragist movement.

Winters combines the history of women’s rights in the early twentieth century with a spell-binding story of a young woman caught at a crossroads between family and self.  A strong female protagonist, realistic dialogue, and well-written prose allow the reader to become immersed in Olivia’s rather unique (and sometimes frightening) world.  Aesthetically, bibliophiles and novices alike will love the old-fashioned introductory chapter photographs with leading quotes.   A timeline of “When and Where U.S. Women Gained Full Suffrage” and Recommended Reading are included.

Station Eleven by Emily Mandel: Gripping, Poignant, and All Too Realistic

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

“The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.”
 Czeslw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks

A very rare five-star review for this stellar, emotional, and frightening (in its literal capacity) book. In Mandel's capable hands, different threads of lives are woven in and around each other before and after a devastating epidemic of the flu. You not only learn about the people after the flu and how they survive, but before -- what made them quintessentially them. This type of book has a high rate of disaster, but Mandel weaves their lives flawlessly. 

It all begins, and ends, with Shakespeare – a famous actor reprises the role of King Lear for theatre audiences, only to suffer a heart attack on the stage.  Only a few hours later, a devastating flu-like epidemic begins to sweep the globe, killing off 99 percent of the population.

Some of Mandel’s sentences are a brain-full; for example: “Kirsten picked up a couple of mildewed binders to study the stickers and the Sharpie incantations—‘Lady Gaga iz da bomb, ‘Eva + Jason 4 evah,’ I <3 Chris,’ etc.—and on a cooler day she might have spent more time here, interested as always in any clue she could find about the lost world, but the air was foul and still, the heat unendurable, and when August emerged from the men’s room it was a relief to walk out into the sunlight, the breeze, and the chatter of crickets” (39% Kindle version).  While rather effusive, Mandel’s poetic prose flows naturally without becoming overly maudlin, even at the end of the world.

I was sad when I reached the end, for more reasons than one, but namely because it was the end of this immersive novel.

Of all the characters, Miranda is my favorite. She let life batter her around and only took charge at the end, but she was the most relatable.

Don’t let this book go unread.