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Snake Dreamer

by Priscilla Galloway

Priscilla Galloway’s Snake Dreamer is faithfully evoked in cover artist Janet Wooley’s collage of beautiful and monstrous faces, crumbling temples, barren seashores, and sinuous serpents against a wash of intense Mediterranean blue. The story begins in Toronto, with 16-year-old Dusa in the grip of nightmarish dreams that may have come down through the bloodline of her Egyptian grandmother. Dusa – strange name, but her mother liked the sound – is terrified to sleep, as increasingly her dreams are disturbed by hissing snakes that wake her up screaming. Her doctor is stymied, but two Greek sisters, serendipitously in town for a conference, happen to be world experts in the rare disease. It affects only girls, and untreated, leads to catatonia, possibly death.

The women offer to accept Dusa as a research subject, her desperate mother agrees, and Dusa flies to their exclusive Mediterranean clinic. But though their qualifications are impeccable, the sisters are a strange pair, sometimes kindly and professional, sometimes downright weird. Their other patients have mysteriously flown the coop, and the only other people on the island are a surly father and son. By the time we learn the son’s name is Pers, a pattern is emerging: snakes, Dusa, Pers – and those sisters, Teno and Yali, sound suspiciously like mythical Medusa’s snaky sisters, Stheno and Euryale.

As an archaic melodrama unfolds we see Galloway (author of Truly Grim Tales and three books set in ancient Greece) skillfully working her familiar territory of myth and legend. Where she’s less at ease is in pacing this psychological mystery. The narration is jumpy rather than suspenseful, and the final tragedy skims too easily past. We’re asked to accept that Dusa is a very sick young woman, yet we never really sense the horror she is living. That said, there are thrills, chills, and action aplenty, and Dusa and her mother are feisty, resourceful characters that readers will happily engage with.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Stoddart Kids

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 251 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7737-5981-6

Released: July

Issue Date: 1998-8

Categories: Children and YA Fiction

Age Range: ages 13+