Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction (Hell Yes! Texas Women Series) [Paperback]

Lisa Sandlin (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hell Yes! Texas Women Series | Publication Date: April 1, 1997

1960s. Gulf Coast Texas. A white high school girl tinkers with the invisible pieces of her life.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Set in the late 1960s, this refreshing collection of stories deals with black and white youth?not quite grown?who are trying to comprehend why and how they are all mixed together in a Texas oil town. In the title story, "Message to the Nurse of Dreams," two young girls?one black, one white?are brought into a lifelong cautious friendship. As the story's narrator states at the beginning, "What a relief it would have been if Johnetta Pierce and I had met in a dream. We could have traded legs?a white set for brown, brown for white?and walked around the schoolyard in our new ones...all in order to answer the two questions neither of us ever asked aloud: Are you or are you not the basic same as me?" In "Terrell's House," we see how an old black grandfather is treated in an emergency hospital situation. The reader also gets to glimpse what his grandson's generation is seeing in a black-and- white world. Sandlin (The Famous Thing About Death and Other Stories, Cinco Puntos, 1991) has done a masterly job; recommended for public libraries.?Vicki J. Cecil, Hartford City P.L., Ind.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Since the stories are set in the rapidly changing social world of the Texas Gulf Coast, Sandlin's characters' inherent confusions are both aggravated and ennobled by racial intermingling. In "If You Don't Watch Out," for example, an adolescent named Mayda gains increasing respect for a courageous black family she first encounters in a local restaurant.... Sandlin's stories focus on young women, using their naivete to build moving portrayals of people coming to understand others even as they remain unsure about themselves. -- The New York Times Book Review, Bruce Allen

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093831727X
• ISBN-13: 978-0938317272
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,359,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lisa Sandlin was born in the Gulf Coast oil town of Beaumont, Texas, and lived there before and after a transfer sent her family to Naples, Italy, for three years. She graduated from Rice University in Houston and then lived many years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Once she had earned an M.F.A. in Writing at Vermont College, Sandlin packed a small car and headed for Nebraska in January. She taught at Wayne State College 1997-2009, with semester leaves to teach at The University of Texas and Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Sandlin's fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Crazy Horse, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere and her nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review and in anthologies. Her books are The Famous Thing About Death (Cinco Puntos Press, 1991); Message to the Nurse of Dreams (Cinco Puntos Press, 1997), winner of the Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League and the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; In the River Province (Southern Methodist University Press, 2004), a finalist for the Jones award; and the forthcoming You Who Make the Sky Bend, a collaboration with New Mexican retablo artist Catherine Ferguson (Pinyon Publishing). Sandlin also served as a co-editor of Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (2002) from Omaha's own Backwaters Press. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting short fiction, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction (Hell Yes! Texas Women Series) (Paperback)

Lisa Sandlin is a gifted, idiosyncratic writer who fulfills much of the promise hinted at in her debut book "The Famous Thing About Death" in this surprising, well-crafted collection of tales set in small town Texas. With much humor, grace and insight, she manages to take small, sharply observed vignettes and turn them into revealing miniatures of a larger society shattered by racism, classism and confusion. Without hitting the reader over the head, she solidly makes her points, creating highly memorable characters and individual scenes in the process. If a few of the stories here feel artificial and too readily betray the author's pen at work, all of them, nonetheless, reveal a writer who is only in the first stages of what promises to be an important career.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, funny, totally unique., November 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction (Hell Yes! Texas Women Series) (Paperback)

Deeply imbedded in these stories is a sense of justice tempered with compassion....Her characters flail helplessly at "the way its done".. and perform their own rituals to restore a sense of dignity to their pridicament. They are rewarded with smal miracles; the Black disc jockey encountered during the late-night drive through the oil-derrick-dominated landscape who, from his brilliantly lit transmitter window, laughs and blows them a kiss. Laurie Macrae, The Workbook, Journal of the Southwest Research andInformation Center; winter, 1997

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent read, and an interesting discussion of race., November 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction (Hell Yes! Texas Women Series) (Paperback)

An excellent read, and an interesting discussion of race relation in the South during the 1960's. Sandlin offers rare insight into the psychology of people who struggle to deal with changing social conditions in the America South. She richly deserves the awards she has alreay garnered, and probably many more.aalexand