Before We Sleep

Before We Sleep by Lent, Jeffrey. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781620404997.

The sweeping, intergenerational story of a Vermont family, from WWII to the dawning of the 60s--the most magisterial and moving novel of acclaimed author Jeffrey Lents career. Katey Snow, seventeen, slips the pickup into neutral and rolls silently out of the driveway of her Vermont home, her parents, Oliver and Ruth, still asleep. She isnt so much running away as on a journey of discovery. She carries with her a packet of letters addressed to her mother from an old army buddy of her fathers. She has only recently been told that Oliver, who she adores more than anyone, isnt her biological father. She hopes the letters sender will have answers to her many questions. Before We Sleep moves gracefully between Kateys perspective on the road and her mother, Ruths. Through Ruths recollections, we learn of her courtship with Oliver, their marriage on the eve of war, and his return as a changed man. Oliver had always been a bit dreamy, but became more remote, finding solace most of all in repairing fiddles. There were adjustments, accommodations, sacrifices--but the family went on to find its own rhythms, satisfactions, and happiness. Now Kateys journey may rearrange the Snows story. Set in a lovingly realized Vermont setting, tracking the changes that come with the turning of the seasons--and decades--and signaling the dawning of a new freedom as Katey moves out into a world in flux, Before We Sleep is a novel about family, about family secrets, and about the love that holds families together. It is also about the Greatest Generation as it moves into the very different era of the 1960s, and about the trauma of war that so profoundly weighed on both generations. It is Jeffrey Lents most accomplished novel.