Booklist - August, 1999
“Moats, a filmmaker, artist, and author of The Gate of Dreams (1993) has written a poetic fictionalized memoir that recounts the most bewildering and frightening of experiences, the onslaught of mental illness. In culling through painful memories, she came to the realization that “each of us is deeply directed by the legacy of unresolved emotion passed from generation to generation.” The legacy her novel explicates is the shadow of guilt and grief thrown across time by the death of a child. It was 1904 when Christianna lost two-year-old Anna, her first-born, while pregnant with Lisbet. Tormented by sorrow, she never let her surviving daughter forget that “there was one who came before.” Forever haunted by her lost sister and her mother’s despair, Lisbet names her daughter Anna, and demands loyalty rather than freely giving love. For all her suffering, Anna is more fortunate: she gets help and breaks the spell. Moats’ sequencing of scenes and gift for metaphor and distillation render her psychologically acute narrative as supple as film without sacrificing the beauty unique to language.”
Donna Seaman
BOOKLIST
August, 1999
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