Dreaming Back - Hardcover

Hirsh, M. E.

2.5

12 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312097891 ISBN 13: 9780312097899

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

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Leigh Haring endangers her life to discover why her sister died and becomes involved in an effort to prevent a government seizure of a valuable resource on native American reservation land

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From Publishers Weekly:

Seven years after the appearance of Kabul , Hirsh pens another mystery with a mission, investigating the use, and restriction, of drugs in official experiments, subliminal messages in alcohol advertising, the fragility of Native American sovereignty and how U.S. business interests and the government can manipulate these arenas to their advantage. Leni Haring, a teacher in New Mexico, is strangled in her home the night before she was to fly to Boston to ask her father, a retired MIT scientist who once had security clearance, if he could find out why an unmarked helicopter is prospecting at night on sacred Hopi land. When Leigh Haring visits her sister's house, she finds a laptop computer and a loaded gun carefully secreted; she cannot find her sister's half-Hopi lover, Ben Naya, because as a prime suspect, he has gone into hiding. With the occasional help of Ed Harris, a friend of Leni and Ben, Leigh probes the mystery of her sister's death and learns an important secret about their family history that Leni kept for years. Readers who want a straightforward, gripping yarn are advised to look elsewhere; those interested in the issues Hirsh raises--and able to bear the prose's intermittent elliptical pretentiousness--may find this mystery-with-a-message worth their while.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Hirsh's first novel, Kabul (1989), won praise for its deft handling of multilayered conflict--political, cultural, and personal--against the backdrop of the Afghan War. In Dreaming Back, Hirsh performs similar magic in her native land. Boston jewelry designer Leigh Haring's effort to understand the murder of her older sister Leni in an isolated hillside home in Chama, New Mexico, forces the young artist to confront a tangle of complications: from the CIA's experiments with mind-altering drugs in the 1950s and Leni's anthropological dissertation research into the uses of natural hallucinogens to the religions of Native Americans and the global competition for superconducting materials. It might seem Hirsh's novel carries too much baggage, but the author keeps her narrative grounded in its concern with what is owed: between spouses, sisters, parents and their children; between lovers, friends, citizens and their government; and between a "nation of immigrants" and the peoples who lived on this continent "before Columbus." Long after the tense final scenes of Dreaming Back resolve the mystery of Leni Haring's murder, readers will be haunted by the larger issues Hirsh's story dramatizes. Mary Carroll

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