Bones of the Moon Hardcover – January 1, 1988 by Jonathan Carroll
Book 1 of 4: Answered Prayers
 
Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams-and whose dreams control her life.

In her first dream, she found the perfect man-and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. Slowly and quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her-but even her newfound courage may not be enough.
 
From Publishers Weekly
Carroll's first novel, The Land of Laughs, is something of a minor classic, but this one, his third, is, ultimately, a failure. A young woman named Cullen, happily married and the mother of an infant daughter, begins having unusually coherent dreams, set in a fabulous land called Rondua. She dreams she is on a quest, accompanied by a young boy whom she comes to realize is the child she aborted several years before. Eventually Cullen and her son are put in confrontation with an evil, protean monster known as Jack Chili. We learn that in some forgotten time Cullen had failed at a previous confrontation, failed morally, abandoning her compatriots to save herself. Shrouded in symbolic imagery, this is a veiled reference to the abortion, as the book increasingly functions, however subtly, as anti-abortion polemic. More of a problem,in the narrative, are sentimentality in lieu of emotion, occasionally cloying preciousness and the general superficiality of characterization.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
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