Sing to Me of Dreams

The author of Too Deep for Tears presents the romantic and spiritual journey of a gifted woman from an Indian childhood filled with ritual and visionary dreams to her life with a troubled family of patrician British immigrants. Born on Vancouver Island in the late 19th century, beautiful, green-eyed Tanu is the daughter of a Salish tribeswoman and one of the itinerant whites who seized the island's bounty. Chosen from birth for the lonely but revered role of shaman, Tanu refuses to honor a devoted suitor with marriage, for her dreams portend a life beyond the forest. Schooled by missionaries and renamed Saylah (Sarah), she is assigned as housegirl to the family of Julian Ivy, a recluse haunted by his own dark dreams of failure and the desertion of his elegant wife. Saylah's sacred stones and healing arts, her Indian ways--and innocence of conventional modesty--enchant the Ivy heir, handsome, sultry Julian, but his advances force the conflicted Saylah to flee to the forest seeking dream approval of her white suitor. Though at times Saylah's mysticism and her inner struggle to bridge two cultures are overdrawn, this is a graceful, if lushly romanticized portrait of a woman's odyssey. Doubleday Book Club selection; major ad/promo. (Nov.)