Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Before We Sleep
    Before We Sleep
    Before We Sleep
    Audiobook14 hours

    Before We Sleep

    Written by Jeffrey Lent

    Narrated by Christa Lewis

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    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 isn't 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 father's. She has only recently been told that Oliver, who she adores more than anyone, isn't her biological father. She hopes the letter's sender will have answers to her many questions.

    Before We Sleep moves gracefully between Katey's perspective on the road and her mother, Ruth's. Through Ruth's 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 Katey's journey may rearrange the Snows' story.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9781541476981
    Author

    Jeffrey Lent

    Jeffrey Lent was born in Vermont. He studied Literature and Psychology at Franconia College in New Hampshire. Lent currently resides with his wife and two daughters in central Vermont.

    Related to Before We Sleep

    Related audiobooks

    Sagas For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Paltry Gestures

      Jan 5, 2021

      Paltry Gestures
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Reader

      May 1, 2020

      The Reader
      5 min read

    • Article

      James Welch Native Lit Festival Brings Acclaimed Indigenous Writers Together

      Aug 10, 2022

      Sterling HolyWhiteMountain read James Welch's "Winter in the Blood" for the first time more than 10 years ago, but he remembers the impact it had on him so vividly that it's as though he finished the novel yesterday. "It was incredible to me because

      4 min read

    • Article

      Deliverance Is Seldom: On Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’

      Oct 25, 2022

      Sorrow, in 'The Passenger' and 'Stella Maris,' is the likeliest underpinning of reality. The post Deliverance Is Seldom: On Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’ appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Cj Carey

      May 19, 2021

      OCCASIONALLY, A WRITER CAN TELL YOU exactly how a book began life. In the case of CJ Carey (a pseudonym), she’d gone out for lunch with a friend, who had offered condolences over the 2018 death of her husband, the novelist Philip Kerr. But there was

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sisterly Significance

      Feb 24, 2020

      Sisterly Significance
      8 min read

    • Article

      Our Share Of Night

      Nov 2, 2022

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 736 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Mariana Enriquez Publisher Granta Books This book is A Lot. You may need to take palate-cleansing breaks with kitten videos on YouTube… if you can put it down, that is. A hit on its original publica

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Soundtrack Of My Life

      Jul 23, 2019

      The Soundtrack Of My Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      Oxygen

      Jul 19, 2022

      Oxygen
      2 min read

    • Article

      Wyoming Is a Real Place

      Jun 1, 2021

      Wyoming Is a Real Place
      7 min read

    • Article

      The 22 Murders Of Madison May

      Jul 14, 2021

      ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Max Barry ⏵ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton ➔ Why did Quantum Leap’s Dr Sam Beckett never find his way home? This multiverse-hopping sci-fi novel offers an answer: because travellers can

      1 min read

    • Article

      Diving Through Windows

      Dec 13, 2017

      BY JUSTIN HOCKING I dwell in Possibilit y — / A fairer House than Prose — / More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors — —Emily Dickinson My wife and I live in a 1907 Craftsman bungalow with original crown glass windows. They were hand-blown i

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Before We Sleep

    4/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I'm a big fan of Jeffrey Lent, but this book really didn't cut it with me. For the most part, it's a glorified coming-of-age story, and I'm not fond of teenage angst. Katey Snow adores her father, but he has grown increasingly distant, and Katey and her mother don't get along. When she finds affectionate letters sent by her father's war buddy to her mother, she takes off in search of the man she believes may be her biological father. She encounters good people and bad, hippies and farmers, small town folk and smaller town folk, and encounters everything from kindness to rape. Her story alternates with that of her mother Ruth, who married her high school sweetheart, a man who was never the same after World War II experiences. I thought the novel really dragged, and the characters were dull compared to those in Lost Nation or In the Fall.
    • 4/5
      At the end of Jeffrey Lent’s Before We Sleep, Katey Snow must call her mother. She’s spent an eventful week on the road, having taken her father’s truck on an extended sojourn from Vermont to Virginia, but her imperative is to speak to her mother, from whom she had a fraught departure. The two characters, Katey and her mother Ruth, carry this graceful novel, and have alternating chapters named for each in turn. In Mr. Lent’s usual style, their stories unfold at an even pace, their revelations laid out in a magisterial and majestic tone. Another beautiful and gratifying book from Mr. Lent.Salient events begin with yet another verbal set-to between Katey and her mother. This story, set in the mid-1960s, captures the era’s terrible tension between parents and teen-age children; Katey sees things simply and in straightforward terms, as 17 year-olds do, but her mother sees the same things in terms of threat to be avoided, and stridently challenges her daughter at every turn. One tense evening holds more of the same as mother and daughter go at it hammer and tong yet again.Oliver, the father and husband, sits by as usual, but then, perhaps fed up by the constant bickering, lets fall a bombshell. It is a revelation that sends Katey off on a journey, one in which she discovers certain things about herself and her mother, which lend a new perspective to her life.Mr. Lent deals with the heart’s agendas in unique ways. He makes his characters’ thoughts and feelings so abundantly clear, and in such plain language, that we find our journey with his characters rewarding and believable. This is a sympathetic group - Mr. Lent has a way of making you love his novels’ populace. This novel follows Katey’s journey from indignant youth to sadder-but-wiser young adult in a matter of days. This speeded-up time frame allows for Katey’s progress - it is an eventful trip, as I say - and enough happens that she graduates into a much more nuanced and understanding view of Ruth. Ruth’s own narrative includes the horrifying truth about Oliver’s wartime experience in Germany, and how he and her life are altered as a result of it. Katey’s trip involves meetings with a gallery of strangers, each described in chiaroscuro-type clarity in which Mr. Lent specializes, and which I find kind of a drug.In temporal setting and theme, this piece allies itself more to A Peculiar Grace than to the epics Mr. Lent has set in days of yore: Sleep and Grace portray young people coming of age through their own particular trials on the way to reflective and wise adulthood. The speed with which Katey’s point of view shifts reflects the shock of her experience with true independence. Ruth’s position as a teacher gives her a close-up view of the novel vagrancies of 1960s high-schoolers; in her mind this warrants her carping over her daughter’s direction in life, although frankly there’s nothing much alarming there. As always, Mr. Lent achieves a deft touch with the simplest language. Conversations are real-life oblique and laconic in New England style. Real human growth through everyday striving and stumbling - these are Mr. Lent’s stock in trade and they are fully on display here. Take this one up by all means!
    • 4/5
      Some books are sleepers. This one was going so well with an Odessy feel building up. Wonderful characters barely lighted upon until time to move on to the next.The Katey character was interesting and complex. Only 17 in January and a high school graduate. And a 1967 at that and accepted a full ride to become a member of the class of 1970Small thing like that drive me crazy.The mother character I could not stand and the last 30 pages were wasted on her redemption or whatever. My hubs says I can be hard on people but for the life of me I struggled to find any redeeming qualities. The grandmother, Jo, I adored.