Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1010 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Synopsis
Bestselling author Torey Hayden's novel is a fascinating study of a fractured family, a troubled child, and a psychiatrist's attempts to rescue them. Conor, aged nine, arrives in the play therapy room of child psychiatrist James Innes with the diagnosis "autistic". His mother Laura, an aloof, enigmatic novelist, can't handle him. His rancher father, embroiled in divorcing Laura, does not feel there is anything wrong with Conor. His six year old sister Morgana insists he really does see ghosts. As James becomes convinced Conor is not autistic, he is drawn first into Conor's strange world of "things the cat knows" and then into Morgana's stories of her friend the "Lion King". James is pulled most deeply, however, into Laura's world; at first that of a lonely, rather difficult woman and then, eventually, into the world of her imagination, an enthralling world that seems almost real - and that hides a terrible secret.

Customer Reviews

Comes together brilliantly
I quite enjoyed this book whilst reading it but as the last chapters drew to a close I REALLY REALLY enjoyed it and blazed through to the end. It's a good story anyway but I was very satisfied with how everything tied together. I even felt the need to tell my totally uninterested husband all about it very excitedly. He remained unimpressed. That's lads for you.

A great biographer does not a good novelist make
I've read most of Torey's memoirs and loved them all, so when I heard she'd written a novel, I had high hopes for it. Unfortunately, Overheard in a Dream was a big disappointment.

What I like most about the autobiographical books isn't just the gripping and fascinating subject matter, but the way Torey paints a vivid picture of the characters and settings. You feel as though you've really been there and met these people.

By contrast, I felt this novel was poorly written. The plot was promising, but the characters were wooden and the descriptions were uninspired. As another reviewer commented, there was a lot of telling and not much showing. Rather than entering into the characters' world, I felt I was just being given the "facts" of what happened.

I would say Torey has a great talent for depicting real people, real settings, real details and real emotions. Her ability to take her own experiences and transform them into good books is second to none. However, when it comes to fiction, she doesn't seem to have the imagination to flesh out the details and make her creations live.

This may be something she can improve on, but for now I'll stick with the non-fiction.

Pseudo-intellectual, VC Andrews quality
Part of the problem going into this book was that I bought into the hype. I was intrigued at the prospect of a book being "too novel", according to the publishers, for what they perceived to be the average English speaker. Having appreciated a few of the insights Hayden offered in some of her nonfiction works, I figured she would bring that to bear through well-developed characters, vivid writing, and other staples of good novels. Because of the long wait for English publication, however, maybe subconsciously I expected it to be not only entertaining, but something I would keep on my shelf and return to. I mean, there must be some unheard-of creative jewel in there somewhere to make us wait that long, right?

Not exactly. The setup is certainly intriguing -- the son of the famous author Laura Deighton ends up in a psychiatrist's office presenting autistic-like symptoms and communicating increasingly cryptic things via a stuffed cat. Despite the fact that you have no idea what he's talking about until the last third of the novel, Conor is actually the most well-rounded character in this book, which -- considering that you know him only by his monosyllabic utterances -- doesn't bode well for the portrayal of the other characters. However, the boy's words taken alone are eerie, and along with psychiatrist James you might find yourself rooting for Conor as you try to make sense of them.

Unfortunately, this book really isn't about Conor. Conor himself takes up maybe a fourth of the book. The other (very thick) three fourths of the book are taken up by Laura's sessions with James, which alternate with whole chapters in italics -- Laura's story about a being called Torgon. Here there is most certainly more telling than showing. Some of this is understandable -- she's in the shrink's office, after all -- but all the same I feel it might have been handled better differently. When Laura talks to James, even though her words are in quotes, it is not believable human speech. I know Laura is a writer, but even writers have to speak like us poor normal folks sometimes. An occasional sentence fragment or "Um" or a more relaxed vocabulary wouldn't have hurt. She's already forcing him and us to read her writing (more on that in a moment), and now she's making him listen to an audio book too.

Considering she narrates her life like VC Andrews, this isn't a good thing. I could go into litcrit mode and say that the pretentious narration might be a reflection of Laura's arrogance, but I don't think so -- it just comes across as pretentious writing for lack of better dialogue. I may have been able to swallow it better if the quotation marks had been left off, and it were simply understood that we were in Laura's point of view then -- like a flashback or something. Then I wouldn't have to suspend my disbelief that people used so many adverbs and stage directions -- let alone verbatim dialogue -- in real life, out-loud conversation. Phrases like "I retorted indignantly" or "he smiled warmly" look weak and redundant even in writing, but they feel especially out of place in what is supposed to be speech.

Much of the story that eventually meanders to what's wrong with Conor has to do with the magical Torgon. The stories of Torgon intersect quite obviously with the story of Laura. I cannot tell you how tempted I was to skip those sections. Laura even warns James when she gives him the papers that they aren't very good, because she wrote them when she was a teenager. Believe me, Laura wasn't kidding. I hate to say it, but the chapters that are supposed to be so pivotal made the whole book a drudgery. The chapters dealing with Torgon read like bad teenage fan fiction. Fan fiction for what, I'm not sure, but it's the only form of writing I can use to describe the quality of stilted dialogue, melodrama, and faux-medieval characters about whom, like Laura, I could not care. They have no personality. These parts acted as seriously detrimental speedbumps, bogging down the parts I actually mustered some interest in, such as the villain. (Don't worry, you know who he is and what eventually happened to him almost right away. It requires no effort.)

Much of the conflict -- the intersection of imagination with reality, and how much children really are affected by things -- was interesting in itself. Unfortunately, it was so glossed over. The other children were only given cursory treatment, so that the ambiguous ending hinging on Conor's sister Morgana lacked impact; I couldn't care about her either. I would have liked to know more about Laura's husband and the strain he hinted that her creativity bore on their marriage. But all of the characters were cardboard, even the imaginary ones. I read the book because I wanted to find out what happened to Conor, but believe me it was very long, very annoying hard going. Worse was James' gushing over the character development in Laura's books, and Laura telling him "My books are quality literature." If Hayden fancies herself to be Laura's counterpart, she has a long way to go.

The book is at least entertaining if you can slog through it, but little more than a written soap opera. I don't have space on my bookshelf for something I don't want to come back to. If you want something that explores the relationship between an artist and a creation, try The Great Good Thing, The Dark Half, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, or even Frankenstein. If you want a fictional depiction of a writer's life among other things, The World According to Garp is excellent. All of these have actual character development.