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Queen Of Dreams

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

ISBN: 0385506821
ISBN-13: 9780385506823
Format: Hardcover

Summary

Rakhi's Berkeley coffee shop may have to succumb to a nearby corporate competitor, and Rakhi is full of anxiety about her gallery show coming up. Trying to run a business, work on her art, and be a mother to her six-year-old daughter (and fend off her obnoxious ex-husband) are taking their toll. Now, to make matters much, much worse, her mother is killed in a mysterious car crash. And Rakhi's mother was a most unusual person: an interpreter of dreams who believed they could foretell the future. Rakhi and her grieving father turn to her mother's dream notebooks in an attempt to find out more about her mother's life, and perhaps about her own.

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Media Reviews

"[A] tasty curry that's half-mystery, half-fantasy in a clever tale of a young woman trying to sort out the mystery of her mother's death...Richly textured and artfully told...."

-- Kirkus

"[A] cleverly imagined tale of love, forgiveness and new beginnings....Divakaruni does a good job working current issues into the novel and avoids synthetic characterization, creating a free-flowing story that will captivate readers."

-- Publishers Weekly

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 1.12 pounds
Pages: 340

Publisher's Notes

In QUEEN OF DREAMS, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni once more spins a fresh, spellbinding story of transformation. Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing, with her family and her world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream-teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others, to foresee and guide them through their fates. This gift of vision fascinates Rakhi, but also isolates her from her mother’s past in India and the dream world she inhabits, and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her own painful secret, Rakhi’s solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which begin to open the long-closed door to her past.

As Rakhi attempts to divine her identity, knowing little of India but drawn inexorably into a sometimes painful history she is only just discovering, her life is shaken by new horrors. In the wake of 9/11, Rakhi and her Indian friends suffer a brutal attack in which they are called “terrorists,” unveiling dark new complexities about their acculturation.

“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” Rakhi's mother writes in her dream journals. In lush and elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream, one that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, and from which readers will be reluctant to wake.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Bantam Dell Pub Group (2004) - from $1.00
Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (2005) - from $3.00

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Queen of Dreams: A Novel

Chitra Divakaruni

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