I bought the paperback edition of In Restless Dreams from Wren Handman in March 2020. We read together at an Author Reading in B.C. and she was so funny and entertaining, I had to buy her book. (Mini-spoiler: Wren read the part where Sylvia eats “the brownie” at a party—an act that shows her hero’s innocence.)
Written in casual first person, we spend the whole book in Sylvia’s head. She’s a normal teen with some extraordinary problems. Her parents are separated, so after her mother almost commits suicide, Sylvia and her thirteen-year-old brother, Eric, are sent to live with her rich attorney father in the Upper East Side, New York. Oh, to have such problems—a mansion, a father who doles out credit cards, and a hot chauffeur to shuffle you to and from prep school!
The first half of the book follows Sylvia’s challenges adjusting to the rich privileged, ofttimes, cruel kids at her new rich prep school. About half-way through the book, Sylvia eats “the brownie” and suddenly starts seeing things she shouldn’t—even given the nature of “the brownie.”
The back-half of the book chronicles her adventures as the new Phantasmer—a being who can change Fairy with her thoughts. She’s introduced to The Stranger from the Unseelie Court and the hot, blond green-eyed knight from the Seelie Court, and we are entertained with the history and complications of Fairy.
There’s a thread of Alice in Wonderland running through the text. My favorite quote: “Artists and thinkers imagine so strongly, they warp bits of the world to match their creation. Lewis Carroll dreams of Jabberwocky and somewhere a fae is born who truly hates Vorpal swords.” Sylvia’s entry into Fairy is much like Alice’s into Wonderland, and this is exactly what Handman’s done in this book—dreamed a Phantasmer and so she is born.
Judging by the lengthy set-up, I’m assuming this is a series. Hurray! There’s already a hint of a love triangle between Sylvia, The Stranger, and the Green-Eyed Knight.
A Yukon camping getaway in December with a Newfoundland dog and a wolf-dog tells you how much Casey and Eric need a break alone together. Eric Dalton is the Sheriff of Rockton, a Yukon town of two hundred rebellious refugees and Casey Duncan is the detective. There is one more law officer in this town, Sheriff Will Anders, who’s holding down the fort while his friends escape for two days. Literally. Rockton is a fort in the wilderness, complete with walls and gates. People have to apply to live in Rockton and everyone accepted is there escaping something life-threatening, be they perpetrator or victim or both.
Casey and Eric met in book one, cohabited in book two, and now, in book five, they’ve settled into a marriage. So, as couples do at this stage in their relationship, they’re contemplating what comes next. Children. However, Casey was beaten so badly by a gang of men when she was a teenager, she isn’t sure she can conceive or carry a baby to term. This obsession with parenthood and babies is a theme that gets triggered in the first scene and carries through to the end.
Eric has gone hunting with the wolf-dog and Casey wakes up alone in the woods. Well, alone except for Storm, her bouncy one-hundred-and-forty pound Newfoundland dog who is now sixteen months old and learning to track. Casey and Storm go to collect wood for the fire, and Casey hears something. A baby crying. Except there’s nothing anywhere but a heap of snow in the middle of the clearing. A trained homicide detective, Casey is immediately suspicious, then she begins to dig. What she uncovers is bizarre and heartbreaking: a murdered woman with an infant beneath her jacket clutched to her chest. The rest of the book is a chase to discover murderer and motive.
The baby is tiny, a month old at best—a winter baby—born in a time of hardship. She’s healthy though, despite being buried alive in the snow, freezing and dehydrated. Someone’s been nursing her, though not the dead woman, who Casey quickly discovers is a wildling with tattoos.
This story delves into life in the various communities outside Rockton, each with its own morals, rules, and cultures. Besides the folks who live in the First and Second Settlements, there are traders and tribes of hostiles roaming the woods. And as Casey pursues the killer, we meet representatives from all these communities.
Would you ever contemplate living alone in the woods? Some people do. Maryanne, a professor who was once Rockton’s biologist, left the town of two hundred to live with another woman and their partners in the woods: a doctor, a wilderness guide, an eco-builder, and a biologist. They had plans and hopes and wilderness experience until the hostiles attacked, killed the men, and took the women.
Maryanne, who Casey meets and brings back to Rockton, explains that the hostiles also have rules. Sex must be consensual and women choose partners as necessary protectors. Women are not allowed to bear children, so if they get pregnant, it’s terminated. Rape is forbidden. The female shaman conducts rituals and makes the teas: two types … one that creates a state of “tranquil unreality” and another for special occasions that ramps everyone up into a “wild, primal frenzy.”
A complexity of this story is that Eric and his brother Jacob were born to settlers. When his parents left him alone to go trading, Sheriff Dalton and his wife took him to Rockton and “adopted” him without his parents’ consent. Eric’s background naturally affects the way he lives. He was too young to remember but still wonders about his real parents.
Much crime fiction is plot-driven—follow the clues, solve the murder—but in this book more than in her other four novels, Armstrong balances plot and character development. Casey grows with every encounter and reveals more of her hidden personality. Throughout the book, we are privy to several different types of relationships. People come to the Yukon to escape the south but bring their problems and prejudices with them.
As usual, Kelley Armstrong delivers a tense, suspenseful mystery, with her characteristically clean, tight prose. With so many eccentric suspects, Casey is kept guessing and second-guessing right until the big reveal. In the end, Casey and Eric get their quiet moment alone, and it’s time to contemplate love and families and what they want next. This series could go on forever. Let’s hope it does.
As I was working on my writing course this afternoon, I came across this letter I wrote to my mom on Valentine’s Day 2003. She wasn’t well. Dementia and strokes had taken their toll and I hoped to trigger good memories for her. In doing so, I triggered my own.
Though I end the letter by promising to come and see her that summer, it didn’t happen. She passed over on May 1, 2003, Beltaine, and so this ended up being a kind of farewell.
I do hope someone read it to her. We loved the same things, her and I. I hope she closed her eyes and traveled with me among the trees and flowers and bygone seasons. I hope for a moment she relived the beauteous times of her life on our farm in Pickering.
My Mom
My Dearest Mom:
It is St. Valentine’s Day. My
daughter is almost twenty, and you are in your ninetieth year. I float
somewhere in between, still feeling like a young woman, but when I look into
the department store mirror I see someone unrecognizable. I wonder if I will
ever feel my age. This is a kind of limbo. I am beyond childbearing, yet I
often feel like a child. And, of course, I am. I am your child and will always
be. I find you in a country garden, in a warm jar of preserved peaches, in a
well-worn novel, in a nonsense rhyme, and a giggle.
Do you know that I remember
all the trees and flowers from our farm? On the roadside, a tangle of tiger
lilies swelled each spring, and beside them hovered a chokecherry bush. Dixie
Road was hidden by a hedge of cedars that grew into an impenetrable wooden wall
over the years. At the front door snug against the blue cement steps was your
rockery—a murmuring mass of blooms: purply blue delphiniums, giant hot pink
peonies swarming with ants, crimson gladiolas, and fuzzy, buttery irises
towered over the blossoming ground creepers.
In the backyard, a weeping
willow tickled my rosy cheeks, the arm of an old apple tree held my makeshift
steel trapeze, and Manitoba maples multiplied each year when the wind unleashed
their keys. It was a topsy-turvy world, as I swung on my trapeze hanging by my
knees, and sometimes by my ankles. Beside my playhouse and the old outhouse,
the lilac garden marked the border into the vegetable fields. The north side
was a hubbub of rhubarb, and the south side a soft plethora of yellow
primroses, and deep blue Sweet William.
I remember them all. Do you?
The orchard was a place to lie and drift in the misty veils of clouds that shifted shapes and whispered words. I wrote poems there, beneath the old apricot tree where a Baltimore oriole had been seduced by the coral blossoms and built a silken nest that swayed like a stocking from its branches. A tiny cherry tree clung to life amidst several pear trees and my favourite apples, a half snow-half something that I’ve never been able to find again.
Was spring your favourite
season as it was mine? The first shoots burst through the mud and snow, creeks
swelled their banks and called to me and my rubber boots. Bees raced to
pollinate the blossoms like eager young boys darting this way and that
throughout the gardens. Purple violets and lily of the valley burst through the
emerald grass and all the earth awoke.
Summer was sewn up by rows
of potatoes, peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, and carrots all demanding attention. A
long row of raspberries enticed Bootsie who loved to nibble them off the
branches. And what you did with that harvest.
One wall in the damp stony
cellar was lined with shelves of preserves: jars of pinky red tomatoes, bright
orange peaches, green chunky relishes, bread and butter pickles. How did you
ever manage? And then it was pear-picking time and ladders were set up in the
orchard so baskets of succulent green pears could be sent off to Richardson’s
IGA in Pickering Village. It was a miraculous place to grow up, akin to the
earth, listening to the winds, the insects, the birds, the trees and flowers.
It lives in my memory. Can you remember it too?
Now there must be snow on the ground in Pickering, crusting the earth, and ice-encased branches tapping against the windows begging for release. I hated winter. I hated the cold, the trudging, the attempts at tobogganing in the back fields and skating at William’s pond by myself. I tried to like it. But I hated it. My frozen toes, numb in damp snow boots, would itch like crazy when I finally warmed them. The upper tips of my ears threatened to break off, and they too would itch when they finally thawed. The only things I really loved were the gigantic icicles that clung from roof corners, and the feathery paintings by Jack Frost on our living room windows. I hibernated, like the rest of the earth’s creatures, and came alive again in spring.
Winter was the reason I moved to B.C. Here, there is only a long, long autumn followed by a long, long spring. Here I am awake all year long, hiking in the rainforest and along the ocean. Here I do not freeze and itch for months at a time.
I don’t miss Ontario, but I
do miss you, Mom. And I wish that I could be with you, especially now that
you’re not well. You must remember to
eat and drink as much as you can. Please. Water is our life force. So you must
drink even when you don’t feel like it.
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