Dreaming of France
Winner of the 2017 Blue Light Book Award
Available on Amazon
Kerry Tepperman Campbell’s brilliant debut delves into the imaginations of American women who are fascinated with France. These jewel-like vignettes and prose poems weave their way between an imagined world and a real one. Immersed in luminous moments, the characters find themselves in a series of fully-realized French landscapes including a well-preserved Roman amphitheater in Provence, a refugee camp in Calais, and Empress Josephine’s famous rose garden in Rueil-Malmasion. The reader will be swept away by these seductive vignettes, set in a world where archetypes hover and even small moments become indelible.
Praise
This is a book that’s impossible to categorize — is it poetry, prose, a novel? —and also one of the most beautiful, deeply pleasurable things I’ve ever read. Cecilia Woloch, Carpathia and Sur la Route
Kerry Tepperman Campbell is a master of sensual and imaginative transcendence. Her vehicle is a dream/memory recipe that transports the reader to an elevated experience of France, achieved through the art of ‘inseeing’ or writing with exceptional empathy. Jeffrey Green, French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy
The work in this collection will transport the reader to a personal d’Orsay full of scintillating poetic vignettes that do exactly what the French are so good at doing – making life sensually exquisite. Philip Kobylarz, A Miscellany of Diverse Things
Dreaming of France is an invitation to pay attention to tiny moments. Every page of this wonderful book is a delight. Diane Frank, Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines
A gorgeous, genre-defying book. When reading it I melted into and out of dreamy, luscious versions of life. This writer is an artist, an epicure of living. She takes her narrator’s advice: “All you have rushed past must be fully seen.” Kate Evans, Call It Wonder
Debut author Campbell’s book starts with a compelling premise: what do American women imagine of a life in France? And where does this fascination with the European country come from?…The author’s strength lies in her ability to describe all kinds of lives, including those in the provinces: “She loves this grove in Provence, these well-tended, low-growing, / evenly spaced trees; their gray-and-black bark; the way the / branches open, spreading out like the fingers of a generous hand, / palm thrust toward the sun.” Kirkus Review