Thoughtful readers and their parents will find this multilayered story of mother-daughter tensions hauntingly real, and a great discussion book. Ever since her beautiful red-haired mother died of cancer four years ago, Carrie, 13, has been a "missing girl," veritably sleepwalking through each day. And she has a recurring dream: her mother sits at the kitchen table, alive but unsmiling and remote. When her new friend Mona offers to teach her about lucid dreaming--"being awake while being asleep"--she is powerfully attracted to the idea. Could she possibly talk to her mother in her dreams?
But Carrie can't bear to face her confused feelings about her mother's death, especially with her friends, who are loud about their dislike of their own mothers. So where can she find a dream she is willing to share? She has always resisted hearing her grandmother's stories of the Holocaust, but now she begins to listen avidly, and passes off as her own the images of rats and terror from her grandmother's recollections, which she describes to Mona.
As Carrie hears these horror stories with fresh ears, her contempt for her immigrant grandmother turns to compassion, and she comes to a fuller understanding of her mother's childhood. When Carrie at last has a lucid dream, the dream figure turns away with an apologetic smile from her daughter's attempts to communicate, making it possible for Carrie to accept that her mother no longer exists--and to wake up to her own life. --Patty Campbell
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In this introspective but often convoluted novel set in 1967, Metzger (Ellen's Case) introduces two eighth-graders who feel as lost as the "missing girls" they hear about on the news. Ever since her mother's death four years ago, Carrie Schmidt has felt parts of her life slipping away. This year her father has taken a temporary job out of state, and she is living in her Austrian Jewish grandmother's small, dark house in another neighborhood in her native Queens. Memories of her mother are fading too quickly, coming back into focus only in Carrie's dreams. Carrie's desperation to make sense of these dreams draws her to Mona Brockner, an outcast at school, who claims that it is possible to stay awake during sleep. As Carrie spends more and more time at Mona's "picture-perfect" house, her desire to become one of the Brockners borders on obsession, even though the dark, disturbing currents of the Brockner household are immediately obvious to the reader. While the girls' discussions of dreams (which take up a good portion of the novel) are interesting in themselves, they feel tipped into the plot, not an organic part of the story. This is true also of tales about Carrie's family history, told by Carrie's grandmother, who survived nine concentration camps, and Angus, a visiting Scotsman who sheltered Carrie's then-teenage mother during WWII. The elements of this novel are full of promise, but, unfortunately, their combination doesn't add up. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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