Guernica Editions
Review by Brian Tanguay
When Avery Conlon is a young girl in Toronto in 1914 she falls through the ice of a frozen river and becomes trapped beneath. While under the ice she experiences a series of visions. She survives this accident but is afterward blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a powerful second sight, an intuitive ability she can’t explain. She harbors a profound sense that Myrtle isn’t her birth mother and that her parents have been untruthful. Unable to let this idea go, Avery discovers soon after the accident that her father had remarried after her real mother committed suicide by jumping from a bridge. Still unsatisfied, Avery makes a trip to the bridge and, with a “silvery crackling” in her head, realizes that her mother is alive, somewhere.
River Of Dreams is what I’d call a straightforward, mostly linear tale. Avery finds her mother and learns why she left her family behind. She also falls in love and becomes pregnant. The most interesting sections of the book occur in the mental hospital where Averty works as a nurse, for it’s here that she uses her psychic ability to help other women, some of whom have been deposited in the hospital and abandoned. Not only were women’s choices in life limited at that time, the field of mental health was in its infancy, and little was known about postpartum depression, menopause or the long-term effects of domestic violence. Avery has an uncanny ability to help these women examine their circumstances from a different perspective; she gives them hope. Her work isn’t sanctioned by the hospital, of course, so she practices in a dingy basement at night, out of sight of other staff. Avery can’t explain how she succeeds where traditional therapies fail, and she fears being ostracized if she were to try. How could she get anyone to accept the idea that she simply knows?
Even kindly Dr. Leif Munro, who Avery falls in love with, and vice versa, isn’t likely to fully understand her visions, and this becomes a problem in their courtship. Even when Dr. Munro proposes marriage, Avery isn’t sure she can say yes; she wants to continue working with women, but prevailing social norms push her toward the role of wife and mother. “And I have my own ways,” Avery says, “and beliefs that don’t always match science. Well, I can’t ask you to believe what I see. But I am who I am.” In a way, Avery finds herself in the position her own mother had been in years before: accept the role and live a diminished life or rebel against it and risk being seen as a failure and outcast. Quietly bold and unwavering in her determination, Avery is more than prepared to go her own way.
