Before We Sleep

March 27, 2017
In his novel set in Vermont between the end of World War II and the early ’60s, Lent switches between the perspectives of a mother and daughter growing in different directions, but also growing closer as secrets from the past are revealed. Katey Snow and her mother, Ruth, have a strained relationship at the best of times. At age 17, when Katey discovers that Oliver Snow, the man she has looked up to her entire life, is not her biological father, she silently steals away from her parents’ house with a bundle of letters from a mysterious army friend of Oliver’s to learn for herself the truth of her mother’s past and her own beginning. Shifting between the end of the war and the political fallout of the following decades, Lent draws a parallel across time, connecting the vastly different yet similar lives of a mother and daughter each struggling to find her way through the secrets that have defined her—often not through their own doing. Lent’s fine prose depicts the touching physical and emotional journeys of the Snow family against a backdrop of the magical New England landscape.