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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 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 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 doors to her past. As Rakhi's mother writes 'A dream is a telegram from the hidden world'.
In lush elegant prose, Divakaruni has crafted a vivid and enduring dream that reveals hidden truths about the world we live in, from which readers will be reluctant to wake.
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The narrative alternates between Rakhi, who was born in the United States and her mother, Mrs. Gupta, who emigrated from India. Mrs. Gupta has a unique talent - she's a dream teller; she has the ability to translate dreams - be it her own or others. She is driven by the ability to help others through their dreams, having learned the technique from her childhood in India. Without a doubt Rakhi is American but a feeling of belonging to her birth land constantly haunts her. She is married and newly separated from Sonny, a young, carefree disc jockey, and she cares for Jona, their young daughter. One night Sonny left her to fend for herself at a dance party, and she has never forgiven him; she never told her family about it and the incident contributed to their separation.
Rakhi owns The Chai House, a small café, and Belle, her spunky girlfriend helps her run it. Rakhi is also a painter and hopes, one day to be discovered. But when a rival café opens on the opposite side of the street, and her mother dies in a fatal crash, she has to use all the resources at her disposal to save her flailing business, and repair the strained relationship with her daughter. Rakhi's father, who drinks on the weekend, comes to her aid and tries to help her rebuild her life, while also helping her translate her mother's dream journal from Bengali to English.
Much of the narrative centers on the relationship between mother and daughter, and Rakhi's often frustrated attempts to try to understand her mother better. Rakhi is prone to give in to life's dramas too easily - at one stage she angrily wants to close the café after the kitchen accidentally catches fire. She's also frustrated in her quest for her roots, and while she was always close to her mother, she feels angry and resentful that her mother's talent of dream interpretation was never passed on to her. Rakhi becomes obsessed with ancient history, rather than tackling the problem at hand, "this has always been my short coming. My mother dreams and I paint - because dreams look to the future, and paintings try to preserve the past."
Packed with absolutely gorgeous prose poetry, Divakaruni effectively weaves the colourful, mysterious dream world through Rakhi's life. And much of the narrative reads like a rich, sumptuous painting with phrases such as: "his plated green skin shone like rainwater on banana plants in the garden plot," and "A clear, full light tinged with coastal purples."
All the characters register the shock and horror of September 11th, but nothing prepares them for the actions of a few racists and bigots who are fuelled with hatred and anger. How Rakhi and her family and friends handle this incident is a testament to their fortitude and inner strength. The immigrant experience resonates throughout this work: Mrs. Gupta doesn't talk about the past like so many immigrants do, she didn't want to be like those other mothers, "splitting Rakhi between here and there, between her life right now and that which can never be." Mike Leonard February 05.
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