Book Review: To Dwell in Dreams

Not all women relish the idea of being mothers. In fact, some fear it outright. Women who have always desired to have children may struggle with this concept, but the fact of the matter is that some women grow up with a strong sense of what motherhood means--and not necessarily the good parts of it.

This theme is just one of the elements that makes this novel so good. To Dwell in Dreams (#2 in the Once Upon a Reality series) is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a realistic look at the fears and heartbreak of one young woman who makes a dramatic choice and spends the next decade of her life not dealing with it.

Ashlyn Bellissa is a thirty-four-year-old woman trapped in the partying lifestyle of her twenty-something counterpart. Stuck in a sort of arrested development, Lyn buries her disappointment with life in various nameless, faceless men, sleeping pills, and a hardened heart. Her seemingly selfish decisions have left an ex-husband and triplets in her wake, but she feels nothing for them. Or doesn’t she? That’s a question she must finally answer when she meets them—quite unexpectedly.

Told in a sort of reverse chronology, the story retraces how Lyn came to make these hard choices, and as her dreams begin to haunt and weigh down her real life, she arrives at new and more difficult decisions about how her life will look in the future.  

Elizabeth Rose is a promising and talented young writer who brings a dreamlike quality to her prose. Her writing shows a blunt understanding of human emotion that recalls a bit of Hemingway, and an ability to relay an empathy for women that compares with Virginia Woolf. Beautiful. Elizabeth will be a guest blogger here on Friday for her new novel (the third in this series), The Thing About Apples. Check back in then. She's got an amazing word on what it's like to be an autistic Christian.