From Publishers Weekly
Spiked with elements of mystery, suspense and the supernatural, Divakaruni's sixth novel is a pleasantly atypical tale of self-discovery. Rakhi, a single mother and struggling artist living in Berkeley, Calif., has always been vaguely aware of her own mother's unusual gift—the ability to interpret dreams. Between juggling a laundry list of other priorities—keeping her floundering tea shop afloat after a Starbucks-esque supercafe moves in across the street, battling her ex-husband for their daughter's affections, finding her artistic voice—Rakhi longs to know more about her mother's past and her own hazy Indian heritage. After a mysterious car accident claims her mother's life, Rakhi, with her father's help, sets out to decipher Mrs. Gupta's dream journals in hopes of unlocking the secrets of her peculiar double life. A shadowy man in white who appears at pivotal moments, a sinister rival and entries from Mrs. Gupta's dream journals all punctuate this cleverly imagined tale of love, forgiveness and new beginnings. Meanwhile, September 11 disrupts Rakhi's search for identity, and a vicious attack on her friends and family calls their notions of citizenship into question. Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices; Sister of My Heart; etc.) does a good job working current issues into the novel and avoids synthetic characterization, creating a free-flowing story that will captivate readers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Our dream world overflows with confused images -- streets turning to quicksand, talking fish and so on. Yet dreams have a remarkable quality of seeming real. Once awake, we remain spellbound, muttering, "What did it mean?"It's this gulf between dreams and reality that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni seeks in her fourth novel, Queen of Dreams. (Her other books include the bestselling novels The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart and collections of short fiction and poetry.) Divakaruni often focuses on characters balancing two worlds, particularly Indian immigrants struggling through life in America. Now she attempts to bridge the gulf in this affable yet frustrating story of a mysterious, reticent mother, gifted with the ability to interpret dreams, and the daughter yearning to decipher her.American-born Rakhi, artist and co-owner of a funky Berkeley teashop, is the daughter of Indian immigrants whose silence haunts her: "I hungered for all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she'd grown up in -- just as she never spoke of her past." There's plenty that isn't talked about: Mr. Gupta's weekend drinking, Mrs. Gupta's dream interpretation, the mutual disappointment that Rakhi didn't inherit this gift. Yet Rakhi hides behind her own silence: She has told no one why she left her husband, Sonny, who shares custody of their 6-year-old daughter and longs for reconciliation.After her mother dies in an inexplicable, late-night car crash, Rakhi discovers a collection of her "dream journals," written in Bengali. She's forced to rely on her father to translate, though "I cannot remember a single instance in my life when I felt close to him." Her father tells her the journals contain "lessons, stories from old books, famous dreams, clients, people she knew," and Rakhi demands, "Isn't there anything about herself?" That's exactly what these journals offer, all the words her mother couldn't speak. Rakhi's struggles are engaging enough, but the language of the dream journals soars, momentarily transporting this book to another realm. The writing in these chapters evokes a life as believable and fantastic as one's own dreams: "Calcutta was full of dreams: not only the ones being dreamed by its present inhabitants but old, interrupted ones that hung motionless over the sluggish brown Ganga and colored the night with their confusions." Along with Mrs. Gupta's captivating history and rebellion leading to marriage, we're treated to study notes ("A mirror stands for a false friend") and difficult confessions ("Worst of all, I have not loved anyone fully, not my husband or child"). The terror of Sept. 11 strikes -- "Is it really real?" Rakhi whispers as she watches the horror unfold on TV. The teashop becomes the target of a brutal attack by self-professed "patriots" spouting anti-foreigner sentiments. While mourning the many losses of Sept. 11, Rakhi adds to her list, "And people like us, seeing ourselves darkly through the eyes of strangers, who lost a sense of belonging." While Rakhi's anger is justified, these moments feel forced, as if the author wanted something topical for the book jacket.The book doesn't draw a firm line between reality and dreams: Shadowy strangers materialize in Rakhi's life, doing good and possibly evil; an unexplained package spurs Rakhi to rethink her art; Mrs. Gupta's death defies explanation. When reading the dream journals, Rakhi and her father speculate, "Did she only imagine it all?" as if Mrs. Gupta's extraordinary past were simply another dream. This deliberate blurriness suggests a sleeper awakening, mirroring Rakhi's gradual understanding of herself and her mother. The technique generally works. Readers accept a certain amount of coincidence when the story moves along smartly, as this one does. But this fuzzy reality can backfire. The episode at the heart of Rakhi's marital rift is sickening, but we learn the details impressionistically, and Rakhi wonders, "What really did happen that night? Could she, indeed, have been confused?" Luring readers into thinking this nightmarish incident might be a dream denies our emotional investment in Rakhi and provides a too-easy route to forgiveness.Divakaruni's use of a plot that relies on coincidence and happenstance creates a similar problem. Mrs. Gupta says, "A dream is a telegram from the hidden world." Here dreams are filled with portent and daily lives are laden with hidden meaning. "And what's a coincidence?" Rakhi notes; "And what is an accident?" asks her mother. Perhaps each detail of existence is taut with significance. One could almost be persuaded by the book's final, transcendent moments, when Rakhi finds the perfect web of connection that interpreters of dreams seek. Yet for all that beauty and hope, the ultimate frustration of Queen of Dreams is that its connections have come too conveniently: packages, unexplained strangers, journals with answers, as if life were but a dream. Reviewed by Leslie Pietrzyk Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
The word magical gets thrown around a little too casually in review circles, but when it comes to Divakaruni’s new novel, the description seems apt. More cynical reviewers feel the plot is contrived and the characters hollow. The book’s boosters praise Divakaruni’s descriptive skills, shifting point of view, and acute presentation of Indian-American culture. The mother’s eponymous dreams, presented in separate chapters, add complexity to the narrative structure and drop a heavy dose of mysticism to this tale of immigrant assimilation. It is this same mysticism that determines the success of the fictional illusion: for some it is awe-inspiring; others just see smoke and mirrors. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
Divakaruni's socially and psychologically precise fiction always possesses a mystical dimension, whether overtly, as in The Mistress of Spices (1996), or poetically, as in The Vine of Desire (2001), a beguiling and inspiriting trait she shares with Alice Hoffman, albeit from a Hindu perspective. Now Divakaruni's signature fusion of the realistic and the cosmic achieves a new intensity in her most riveting and politically searing novel to date. Rakhi, a California-born painter, knows nothing of her parents' Indian past. Living hand-to-mouth in Berkeley with her daughter, Jona, after a painful divorce, Rakhi and a friend run a homey little tea- and coffeehouse that comes under siege when a Starbucks-like franchise opens across the street. But more traumatic ordeals await, including the wrenching revelation of the truth about Rakhi's enigmatic mother: she was a dream teller, compelled to interpret other people's dreams whether they asked her to or not. As Divakaruni alternates between passages in Rakhi's mother's spellbinding "Dream Journals" and the story of Rakhi's high-wire life, long-hidden aspects of the temperaments and talents of Rakhi's father and ex-husband come to light, as does the fact that Jona may have inherited her grandmother's gift, and burden. But just as the tea shop finds new life as an informal community center, the horrors of 9/11 detonate, placing Rakhi and her circle, including a turbaned Sikh, in danger as anger, fear, and prejudice instigate violence. Writing, as always, with wit and lyricism, Divakaruni masterfully illuminates the tangible and the numinous, the abruptly changing present and the deep past in a page-turner lush with emotional, cultural, and spiritual insights. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Praise for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“Divakaruni is gifted with dramatic inventiveness [and] lyrical, sensual language.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Divakaruni is an incomparable storyteller. . . . . Part of the beauty of her talent is her ability to capture the true complexity of the emotional landscape in her characters.” —Denver Post

“Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller, illuminating the depths of need and the glitter of hope in the push-pull of growth and self-restraint. . . . Divakaruni is a transplanted cultural treasure.” —Seattle Times

“Among contemporary writers from India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni fills a space all her own. . . . Her fiction draws a line straight to the heart.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Reading Divakaruni is a pleasure. She paints worlds of complex characters and cultures with an absorbing story line and beautiful language that reads like poetry.” —The Oregonian

“Divakaruni’s stories are as irresistible as the impulse that leads her characters to surface into maturity, raising their heads above floods of silver ignorance.” —New York Times Book Review

“[Divakaruni] beautifully blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of a fairy tale.” —Wall Street Journal


Praise from Booksellers for QUEEN OF DREAMS

"Beautifully written, a story for anyone who is trying to find their place in the world."
—Cynthia St. John; Kepler’s Books, Menlo, CA


"QUEEN OF DREAMS weaves mysticism into reality and blends rich culture and secrets with the pain of losing a parent and gaining a perspective."
—Margie Scott-Tucker; Books Inc., San Francisco, CA


"I love the magical, mystical, metaphorical quality of this story.  The dream journal entries themselves are classic Divakaruni, poetic, dream-like and full of metaphors.  I can't wait to recommend it to booklovers and bookclubs."
—Linda Grana; Lafayette Book Store, Lafayette, CA


"I read rhe QUEEN OF DREAMS yesterday in one sitting! I was reminded of the spell Divakaruni wove with Sister Of My Heart, and also the blend of magic and lore and reality and history of Holthe's When The Elephants Dance. I love it!"
—Catherine Jordan; Orinda Books, Orinda, CA


"Chitra Divakaruni weaves a beautiful novel of a family torn between two worlds. In a book that combines magic realism with a clear contemporary story, Divakaruni's beautifully rendered description of life in California for this Indian family is completely absorbing. I loved the book!"
—Luisa Smith; Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA.


"QUEEN OF DREAMS weaves mysticism into reality and blends rich culture and secrets with the pain of losing a parent and gaining a perspective."
—Rick Simonson; Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle


From the Inside Flap
In her most spellbinding novel yet, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni spins a fresh, enchanting story of transformation that is as lyrical as it is dramatic.


Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a 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 September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new love and understanding for her family.

“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” Rakhi's mother writes in her 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.


From the Back Cover
Praise for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
"Divakaruni is gifted with dramatic inventiveness [and] lyrical, sensual language." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Divakaruni is an incomparable storyteller. . . . . Part of the beauty of her talent is her ability to capture the true complexity of the emotional landscape in her characters." --Denver Post

"Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller, illuminating the depths of need and the glitter of hope in the push-pull of growth and self-restraint. . . . Divakaruni is a transplanted cultural treasure." --Seattle Times

"Among contemporary writers from India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni fills a space all her own. . . . Her fiction draws a line straight to the heart." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Reading Divakaruni is a pleasure. She paints worlds of complex characters and cultures with an absorbing story line and beautiful language that reads like poetry." --The Oregonian

"Divakaruni's stories are as irresistible as the impulse that leads her characters to surface into maturity, raising their heads above floods of silver ignorance." --New York Times Book Review
"[Divakaruni] beautifully blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of a fairy tale." --Wall Street Journal



About the Author
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the bestselling author of the novels Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices; the story collections The Unknown Errors of Our Lives and Arranged Marriage, which received several awards, including the American Book Award; and four collections of prize-winning poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Zoetrope, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Best American Short Stories 1999, and The New York Times. Born in India, Divakaruni lives near Houston.

For further information about Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, visit her Web site at www.chitradivakaruni.com.


From the Trade Paperback edition.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

From the dream journals


Last night the snake came to me.

I was surprised, though little surprises me nowadays.

He was more beautiful than I remembered. His plated green skin shone like rainwater on banana plants in the garden plot we used to tend behind the dream caves. But maybe as I grow older I begin to see beauty where I never expected it before.

I said, It's been a while, friend. But I don't blame you for that. Not anymore.

To show he bore me no ill will either, he widened his eyes. It was like a flash of sun on a sliver of mirror glass.

The last time he'd appeared was a time of great change in my life, a time first of possibility, then of darkness. He had not returned after that, though I'd cried and called on him until I had no voice left.

Why did he come now, when I was finally at peace with my losses, the bargains I'd made? When I'd opened my fists and let the things I longed for slip from them?

His body glowed with light. A clear, full light tinged with coastal purples, late afternoon in the cypresses along the Pacific. I watched for a while, and knew he had come to foretell another change.

But whose--and what?

Not a birth. Rakhi wouldn't do that to herself, single mother that she is already. Though all my life that child has done the unexpected.

A union, then? Rakhi returning to Sonny, as I still hoped? Or was a new man about to enter her life?

The snake grew dim until he was the color of weeds in water, a thin echo suspended in greenish silt.

It was a death he was foretelling.

My heart started pounding, slow, arrhythmic. An arthritic beat that echoed in each cavity of my body.

Don't let it be Rakhi, don't let it be Sonny or Jonaki. Don't let it be my husband, whom I've failed in so many ways.

The snake was almost invisible as he curled and uncurled. Hieroglyphs, knots, ravelings.

I understood.

Will it hurt? I whispered. Will it hurt a great deal?

He lashed his tail. The air was the color of old telegraph wire.

Will it at least be quick?

His scales winked yes. From somewhere smoke rolled in to cover him. Or was the smoke part of what is to come?

Will it happen soon?

A small irritation in the glint from his eyes. In the world he inhabited, soon had little meaning. Once again I'd asked the wrong question.

He began to undulate away. His tongue was a thin pink whip. I had the absurd desire to touch it.

Wait! How can I prepare?

He swiveled the flat oval of his head toward me. I put out my hand. His tongue--why, it wasn't whiplike at all but soft and sorrowful, as though made from old silk.

I think he said, There is no preparation other than understanding.

What must I understand?

Death ends things, but it can be a beginning, too. A chance to gain back what you'd botched. Can you even remember what that was?

I tried to think backward. It was like peering through a frosted window. The sand-filled caves. The lessons. We novices were learning to read the dreams of beggars and kings and saints. Ravana, Tunga-dhwaja, Narad Muni--. But I'd given it up halfway.

He was fading. A thought flowed over my skin like a breath.

But only if you seize the moment. Only if--

Then he was gone.



2

Rakhi


My mother always slept alone.

Until I was about eight years old, I didn't give it much thought. It was merely a part of my nightly routine, where she would tuck me in and sit on the edge of my bed for a while, smoothing my hair with light fingers in the half dark, humming. The next part of our bedtime ritual consisted of storytelling. It was I who made up the stories. They were about Nina-Miki, a girl my age who lived on a planet named Agosolin III and led an amazingly adventurous life. I would have preferred the stories to have come from my mother, and to have been set in India, where she grew up, a land that seemed to me to be shaded with unending mystery. But my mother told me that she didn't know any good stories, and that India wasn't all that mysterious. It was just another place, not so different, in its essentials, from California. I wasn't convinced, but I didn't fret too much. Nina-Miki's adventures (if I say so myself) were quite enthralling. I was proud of being their creator, and of having my mother, who was a careful listener, as my audience.

When the story was done my mother would kiss me, her lips as cool as silver on my forehead. Sleep now, she whispered as she left, shutting the door behind her. But I'd lie awake, listening to the soft cotton swish of her sari as she walked down the corridor. She'd stop at the door to my dad's bedroom--that was how I thought of the big, dark room in the back of the house with its large, too soft bed and its tie-dyed bedspread--and I'd hear the companionable rumble of their voices as they talked. In a few minutes I'd hear his door closing, her footsteps walking away. She moved quietly and with confidence, the way deer might step deep inside a forest, the rustle of her clothes a leafy breeze. I'd listen until I heard the door to the sewing room open and close, the sigh of the hinges. Then I'd let go and fall into the chocolate-syrup world of my dreams.

I dreamed a great deal during those years, and often my dreams were suffocatingly intense. I'd wake from them with my heart pounding so hard I thought it might burst. When I could move, I'd make my way down the dark corridor by feel. Under my fingers the walls were rough and unfamiliar, corrugated like dinosaur skin, all the way to the sewing room. I didn't know why she called it that; she never sewed. When I opened the sighing door, I'd see her on the floor, face turned to the wall, covers drawn up over her head, so still that for a moment I'd be afraid that she was dead. But she'd wake immediately, as though she could smell me the way an animal does her young. I'd try to crawl under her blanket, but she always took me--firmly but kindly--back to my own bed. She lay by me and stroked my hair, and sometimes, when the nightmare was particularly troubling, she recited words I didn't understand until I fell back into sleep. But she never stayed. In the morning when I awoke, she would be in the kitchen, making scrambled eggs. The sewing room would be bare--I never knew where she put her bedding. The carpet wasn't even flattened to indicate that someone had slept there.



My discovery occurred on an afternoon when I'd gone to play at the home of one of my classmates. This was a rare event because, in spite of my mother's urgings, I didn't tend to socialize much. Children my own age did not seem particularly interesting to me. I preferred to follow my mother around the house, though she didn't encourage this. On occasion, I listened from behind a door as she spoke on the phone, or watched her as she sat on the sofa with her eyes closed, a frown of concentration on her forehead. It amazed me how still she could be, how complete in herself. I tried it sometimes. But I could keep it up for only a few minutes before I'd get pins and needles.

I've forgotten the girl's name, and why in the course of the afternoon we went into her parents' bedroom, but I do remember her telling me not to jump on her parents' bed, they didn't like it.

"You mean your mom sleeps here--with your dad?" I asked, surprised and faintly disgusted.

"Sure she does," the girl replied. "You mean your mom doesn't?"

Under her incredulous eyes, I hung my guilty head.

"You guys are weird," she pronounced.

After that afternoon, I undertook a course of serious research. One by one, I went to the homes of the children I knew (they were not many) and, between games and snacks and TV, checked casually into their mothers' sleeping arrangements. Finally I was forced to conclude that my family was, indeed, weird.

Armed with the statistics, I confronted my mother.

That was when I made the other discovery, the one that would nudge and gnaw and mock at me all my growing-up years.

My mother was a dream teller.



The discovery did not come to me easily. My mother disliked speaking about herself and, over the years of my childhood, had perfected many methods for deflecting my questions. This time, though, I persisted.

"Why don't you sleep with Dad?" I kept asking. "Or at least with me, like Mallika's mother does? Don't you love us?"

She was quiet for so long, I was about to ask again. But then she said, "I do love you." I could hear the reluctance in her voice, like rust, making it brittle. "I don't sleep with you or your father because my work is to dream. I can't do it if someone is in bed with me."

My work is to dream. I turned the words over and over in my mind, intrigued. I didn't understand them, but I was in love with them already. I wanted to be able to say them to someone someday. At the same time, they frightened me. They seemed to move her out of my reach.

"What do you mean?" I asked, making my voice angry.

There was a look on her face--I would have called it despair, if I had known to do so. "I dream the dreams of other people," she said. "So I can help them live their lives."

I still didn't understand, but her face was pale and tight, like a cocoon, and her hands were clenched in her lap. I didn't have the heart to badger her further. Hadn't she admitted to the most important thing, that she loved us? I nodded my head as though I were satisfied with her explanation.

Her smile was laced with relief. She gave me a hug. I could feel the remnants of stiffness in her shoulders.

"Why don't you decide what you want for dinner?" she said. "You can help me cook it, if you like."

I allowed myself to be diverted and asked for ravioli. I'd had it for the first time on that fateful afternoon in my classmate's house. At home we rarely ate anything but Indian; that was the one way in which my mother kept her culture. She had never made ravioli before, but she looked it up in a cookbook. We spent the rest of the afternoon rolling, crimping, stuffing dough with cheese. The ravioli turned out lumpy, and the kitchen was a disaster, sauce smeared everywhere and shreds of cheese underfoot, but we were delighted with ourselves.

In the middle of boiling the ravioli my mother turned to me and said--though I hadn't shared my classmate's words with her--"Rakhi, remember this: being different doesn't mean that you're weird." She startled me in this manner from time to time, referring to things she couldn't possibly know. But her clairvoyance was erratic. It would create problems for us over the years, making her ignorant of events I expected her to know, secrets I longed to tell her but couldn't bear to speak of.

For example: the reason why I left Sonny.

At dinner Father admired the creative shapes we'd made and said it was a meal at once delicious and instructive. He cleaned up the kitchen afterward, humming a Hindi song as he scrubbed the sink with Comet, his hands encased in neon yellow rubber gloves. He was the tidy one in our household, the methodical one, always kind, the one with music. My mother--secretive, stubborn, unreliable--couldn't hold a tune to save her life. I wanted to be just like her.



Years later, after she died, my father would say, "Not true. She didn't love me, not really. She never let me get that close. The place right at the center of her--that was reserved for her dream gods or demons, whoever they were. She never shared that with anyone. Not even you."

And I would be forced to admit that he, too, was right.


* * *

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing with her family and with a 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 September 11, she and her friends must deal with dark new complexities about their acculturation. Haunted by nightmares beyond her imagination, she nevertheless finds unexpected blessings: the possibility of new love and understanding for her family.

FROM THE CRITICS

Deirdre Donahue - USA Today

Queen of Dreams, Divakaruni's 11th book, includes elements of magic, intuition and folklore drawn from India. But the story of the conflicted, discontented single mother is a darker, contemporary tale that will resonate with anyone who has struggled with modern love, mores and parenthood.

Publishers Weekly

Spiked with elements of mystery, suspense and the supernatural, Divakaruni's sixth novel is a pleasantly atypical tale of self-discovery. Rakhi, a single mother and struggling artist living in Berkeley, Calif., has always been vaguely aware of her own mother's unusual gift the ability to interpret dreams. Between juggling a laundry list of other priorities keeping her floundering tea shop afloat after a Starbucks-esque supercafe moves in across the street, battling her ex-husband for their daughter's affections, finding her artistic voice Rakhi longs to know more about her mother's past and her own hazy Indian heritage. After a mysterious car accident claims her mother's life, Rakhi, with her father's help, sets out to decipher Mrs. Gupta's dream journals in hopes of unlocking the secrets of her peculiar double life. A shadowy man in white who appears at pivotal moments, a sinister rival and entries from Mrs. Gupta's dream journals all punctuate this cleverly imagined tale of love, forgiveness and new beginnings. Meanwhile, September 11 disrupts Rakhi's search for identity, and a vicious attack on her friends and family calls their notions of citizenship into question. Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices; Sister of My Heart; etc.) does a good job working current issues into the novel and avoids synthetic characterization, creating a free-flowing story that will captivate readers. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Sept. 14) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Protagonist Rakhi is no queen (actually, she's a divorced artist mom). But she is struggling to understand her deceased mother's dream journals. Meanwhile, her own dreams are floundering as she and her Indian friends are attacked as terrorists after 9/11. From the popular author of Mistress of Spices. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews