Skip to main content

"The Cure for Dreaming" by Cat Winters


      ***
      The Cure for Dreaming by Cat Winters presents the story of Olivia Mead--a young suffragist in 1900 Portland, Oregon whose headstrong and determined ideas regarding women's rights cause her father to hire a performing hypnotist to hypnotize Olivia into being a more docile and submissive woman. Unbeknownst to her father, the hypnotist instead unlocks Olivia's mind to the ability to see people beyond their physical appearance and into their souls to see their true nature and intentions, while continuing her fight for women's rights.
      I was drawn into this story right away with the presentation of Olivia Mead. She is the daughter of a dentist who is a prominent man in the city of Portland, and has to live up to her father's expectation that she be the perfectly well behaved and content with her place in society of being subservient to all the men in her life. Unfortunately for her father and his expectations, Olivia is also incredibly smart, well read, a progressive thinker, and determined to achieve more in her life than marrying high in society. She has dreams of going to college, having her own career, and standing with the suffragists on the courthouse steps, demanding the right to vote.
      While the story focuses on the story of one girl during this time in women's history, it is without a doubt a fantastic metaphor for the experience of women as a whole. Olivia's father hiring a hypnotist to alter his daughter's mind in order to silence her free will and her expression speaks to the suffrage movement and how people opposed to the movement and opposed to women being granted the same rights as men were striving to oppress and stifle the voices of an entire segment of the population.
      The very essence of this story is that it is a fictional story illustrating a very real period in time when women were fighting for their right to vote, their right to be heard, and their right to be equals. Cat Winters has drawn in elements of the supernatural in order to highlight an important historical moment.
***
      The Cure for Dreaming by Cat Winters is available as an audiobook at the Ocean City Free Public Library.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ape House by Sara Gruen

In Gruen's debut novel Water for Elephants , readers fell in love with the titular elephant Rosie. In her second novel Ape House , a similar fondness occurs with the aforementioned apes. The cast of bonobos live happily in their Language Lab under the watchful eye of scientist Isabel Duncan. They are able to use sign language to communicate and enjoy playing around with visitors and the other scientists. Everything is going great until the lab gets bombed and the apes mysteriously disappear. Once the dust settles, Duncan is horrified to find out that the bonobos have been sold to a television producer who has casted them in their own 24 hour reality tv show. Joining forces with a newspaper reporter, an exotic dancer, animal activists and other research assistants, Duncan takes on the fight of her life to rescue her bonobos and give them the proper kind of life they deserve.

"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

                       Fans of science fiction, video games and pop culture should add New York Times Bestseller “ Ready Player One ” by Ernest Cline to their list of must-reads.   USA Today has referred to it as "Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.” Although this may seem to be a strange comparison, nothing could be quite so accurate. On planet Earth in 2044, real life is pretty dismal. Most of society, including teenager Wade Watts, spends its waking hours plugged into the OASIS, an immense & fully interactive virtual world. OASIS users can be anyone and do anything that they choose. Think of the OASIS as a giant role-playing game…except the main character is you . Users can explore countless planets, purchase real estate, slay monsters and even attend school (as Wade does).   Wade's life changes when James Halliday, the enigmatic & reclusive creator of the OASIS, dies...leaving behind an enormous ...

Tomorrow by Graham Swift

Swift won the Booker Prize for Last Orders back in 2004(?)...but I don't think he'll go 2 for 2 with Tomorrow , a quick read about a family with a dark secret. Paula Hook lies awake on the eve before her and her husband Mike divulge a long kept secret to their twin teenagers. The story centers around the history behind this secret and the rationale behind it. Truthfully, I was kind of annoyed for most of the book. The build up goes on and on for many pages with, like, no pay off whatsoever. The ideas in my mind were juicier than the real "truth" that was going to be told to her children. Though the prose is extremely well-written, I still kept saying to myself, "jesus, get to the point already"