Dreams of Rescue : A Novel [Hardcover]

Laura Shaine Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2003

"I have spent the winter at my summer place," begins the narrator of this startlingly original literary chiller. Juliana Durrell Smythe, known for her "female in jeopardy" performances on film, fears her roles are proving prophetic. As an actress, she is accustomed to rescue. In movies, "Having known the comfort of muscled arms, I still expect, without reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved." But confined to her Victorian lake house, Juliana discovers the discrepancies between film and actual jeopardy. "The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers...." She must walk the fault line of fiction and confront the mysterious and violent end of her marriage. An atmosphere of danger descends with the snow. The men who enter Juliana's life seem suspect; her predicament shadowed by the distress of her housecleaner. How much did she see? How much does she know?

Haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic home, built for a wedding in 1899, Juliana's marital mystery becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, she is compelled to connect a nineteenth-century disappearance to the contemporary despair of the lakeside resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life.

Plumbing the secrets of two centuries, Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after its stunning finale.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for Sleeping Arrangements, her memoir of growing up in New York, novelist Cunningham (Beautiful Bodies) offers a literate and thoroughly entertaining take on the female-in-jeopardy ("FemJep") genre of film and fiction, sending up its familiar conventions while crafting a truly gripping suspense novel. Actress Juliana finds seclusion at Casi di Rosas, her Adirondack hideaway, while awaiting a hearing on her case against her abusive husband, Matt. Having made a career of playing movie victims, Juliana thinks about casting, costumes and camera work in the courtroom and dreams of a handsome leading man coming to her rescue. Fiction and reality collide when a vacuum cleaner salesman stalks her, she gets disturbing crank phone calls and the maid reveals she knows more about all this than she had previously admitted. At the same time, Juliana is haunted by memories of her horrific life with Matt, such as the Thanksgiving at which he threw a turkey at her and killed their cat. It doesn't help matters that her neighbor across the lake is a full-time writer and part-time voyeur or that her court-appointed psychologist thinks she's crazy. Observing the action as if she were viewing one of her own movies, Juliana finds it easier to explain her husband's actions than her own. Why does she forget to bring her best piece of evidence to court? Why does she dress provocatively for an important court appearance? Why is she obsessed with a series of mysterious Victorian deaths, including that of the bride who once occupied her own house? And how will she reach a happy ending if there's no hero to rescue her? Cunningham answers all these questions with energy and wit, simultaneously mocking and bringing new life to FemJep fiction. She skillfully twists its familiar conventions to create her best novel to date.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Cunningham, author of two memoirs and the novel Beautiful Bodies [BKL Ap 15 02], veers away from her usual realism here and into modern-day gothic suspense. Juliana Durrell Smythe, an actress accustomed to playing "FemJep" (female in jeopardy) film roles, finds herself in real-life jeopardy as she spends the winter alone in her isolated summer home in upstate New York. She is awaiting a trial concerning an order of protection against her angry, unstable husband, who attacked her on New Year's Eve. A smart, snarky narrator, Juliana relives the night of the attack, contemplates her marriage, pays her lawyer, and welcomes the heavy snow that barricades her home. When mysterious strangers surface, and threatening notes, visits, and phone calls begin, however, Juliana must stop waiting for a leading man to save the day and start making her own decisions about whom to trust. Like a FemJep movie, this is an addictive read despite some unnecessary plot points and moments of melodrama. Carrie Bissey
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1St Edition edition (May 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743436482
• ISBN-13: 978-0743436489
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,569,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country which were first excerpted in The New Yorker magazine. She has also published the novels Sweet Nothings, Third Parties,Tamara (as L.C.Shaine), Beautiful Bodies, Dreams of Rescue and the YA novel The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume. Her books have been published in ten foreign countries. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and many literary quarterlies. She is also a playwright and her plays have been produced on the main stage at Steppenwolf Theater, on Theater Row in New York,also staged in Manhattan at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club and Ensemble Studio Theatre and are extremely popular in Europe- she has many current international theater productions, in Russia, Bulgaria, Argentina, London, Estonia, Finland. Her plays are often anthologized and appear in many Best Plays of...including Best Plays of 2009-2010,Best Plays of 2007-8, and most preceding years' collections. In addition, her plays have been published in many Vintage collections, including Plays for Women, Leading Ladies, Take Ten, Take Ten II, Laugh Lines, Shorter, Faster, Funnier...and several of her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing- Beautiful Bodies, Bang, and Cruising Close to Crazy.
In addition, she is a journalist and has written many columns for The New York Times, The New York Observer, the London Times and magazine articles for Esquire, the Ladies Home Journal, Organic Living and other periodicals.She is also Artistic Director of the Memoir Institute ([e-mail], and lectures often on memoir and theater at universities and at literary festivals. She has won many awards for her writing, including two NEA Fellowships, in literature and theatre, and two NYFA awards in creative writing and play-writing. She is a member of HB Playwrights Foundation, and The Actors Studio Playwright Unit; she is also an alumna of New Dramatists. and Actors and Writers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lacy lovely literate, August 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreams of Rescue : A Novel (Hardcover)

This delicately written account of a lovely woman trapped in her awful marriage, is one of the best i've read in years. I found it a subtle satire on the movie business of Fem Jep (female in jeopardy) as well... My book club found it, and it has been a stimulating choice!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Winter's perils, June 16, 2003

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Dreams of Rescue : A Novel (Hardcover)

Laura Shaine Cunningham has previously authored two volumes of memoirs (SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS, A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY) and a work of fiction (BEAUTIFUL BODIES). DREAMS OF RESCUE is her first book in the "mystery" genre.

It's the dead of winter, and Juliana Smythe is alone in her summer house, an 1899 Victorian, overlooking Lake Bonticou. Juliana, an actress in cinematic thrillers she collectively calls FemJep (translated as "women in peril"), is separated from her husband Matt after an incident of volcanic domestic violence on New Year's Eve for which Juliana was granted a protection order by the court. Now it's February, and there are to be additional hearings. Juliana's trepidation is almost palpable. Does she have enough money to pay the lawyers? Will the court discontinue the protection order? Will Matt return to the house, protection order or not, and again visit his rage on his wife?

Juliana shares with the reader memories of her marriage, from her first date with Matt seventeen years previous, through the spring, summer and fall of the relationship to the present, the agonizing winter. At one point, Juliana muses:

"How long does it take an eighteen-year-old girl to fall in love? About ten minutes." (That's about nine minutes longer than a testosterone-fueled, eighteen-year-old boy brought to a halt by a whiff of perfume and a view of bare skin.)

As an actress that sees her life as an extended movie script, Juliana DREAMS OF RESCUE - by the kindly lawyer or psychologist or next-door neighbor who'll sweep her into his arms and protect and love her. But reality isn't like that, is it? What's High Drama on the Silver Screen reduces to the mundane in the day-to-day drudge. This is to be Juliana's learning curve.

I was immediately intrigued as to the nature of the "Thing in the Box", a piece of evidence Juliana is to present at the next court hearing that will surely convince the judge of Matt's psychological instability. What a clever tease for the reader!

I'm one of the author's biggest fans, having given five stars to all of her previous works. This time, however, I'm bereft to report something less. By the time the nature of the "Thing in the Box" is revealed, the main plot thread has been frayed by tangential events. What's with the creepy vacuum repairman, who, on a housecall to service Juliana's Supralux 699, may have committed the sin of Onan on her mohair shawl? Or the mysterious neighbor across the lake who watches her with a telescope? Or the pervert who breathes heavily over the phone on late night calls? And what about those seven young girls found naked and frozen to death on the lake's ice back in the late 1890s? Was it murder most foul? Indeed, with all the other enigmas resolving themselves, the final court confrontation with Matt is anticlimactic. The storyline, while not becoming uninteresting, just lost its focus, and I finished the book feeling vaguely unsatisfied.

I suspect that there's a lot of Laura in Juliana, especially evident when the latter remembers the loss of her mother at an early age (as the author recalls in SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS). In any case, Cunningham's forte in all her books has been describing her protagonist's feelings. And this reader was immediately absorbed into Juliana's emotional life. I cared about her throughout. For that reason alone, I'm awarding four stars, and hope Laura will understand.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winter wonderland with compelling truth and beauty, December 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreams of Rescue : A Novel (Hardcover)

The snowy cover drew me with its image of the longing woman in the window. I was not disappointed -- far from it, I was thrilled as the heroine, a star of frightened women flicks, is scared of her husabnd. But she is shaken up in court when they haul out her films -- is she acting? Or she is impressionable? Or has her life started to imitate her art? A reality lesson for women en route to court to defend themselves against abusive husbands.
Intelligent, well composed and spine-tingly. The atmosphere is rich, in comparing the gothic resort to our gritty polyester realities.