A fantastic example of ancestry-driven fiction.
In Friedman’s novel, a cultural anthropology professor at a crossroads receives a grant that draws her back into her Caribbean past.
At the end of her twenty-third year in academia, Dr. Jocelyn Kendall—a cultural anthropology professor—has been denied a promotion. Single and disillusioned with her career, she seems headed toward burnout and early retirement. Then, in a Boston hotel room, she hears the voice of her deceased mother: “When I said marriage is not for you, I had my reasons.”
Jocelyn’s mother died three years earlier, leaving behind a complicated relationship that began when Jocelyn was sent to live with her grandmother in Bequia, a small island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. After returning to her mother at age five, she never saw her grandmother again.
A grant to study the connection between Boston’s and Bequia’s whaling communities offers Jocelyn both a professional lifeline and a chance to reconnect with her past. But a past-life regression takes her even deeper into her family’s history, as she slips into the life of her great-great-grandmother, Mariel. Mariel’s story—marked by romance, danger, and her marriage to a Portuguese sailor—raises profound questions about inheritance, identity, and memory.
In the present, Dr. Gerald Hunter, a Boston curator with his own ties to the island, introduces the possibility of love. Yet the novel’s emotional core lies in the shifting boundaries between past and present, and the merging identities of the women across generations.
Friedman’s prose is fluid and evocative, moving seamlessly from sensual moments—“His touch was ever so light…his kisses were artful, arousing”—to scenes of tension and urgency—“He is planning to kill me!…I was Mariel yet again.” This same fluidity shapes the narrative’s timeline, where past and present blur into a richly immersive experience.
Tangled Dreams stands as a compelling exploration of ancestry, memory, and the enduring power of the past.
