Publisher's Synopsis
Through the radiant protagonist, Dawn, and those who live around her, Harriet Adams shows how life can be taken into one's own hands, steering it into following a positive course and becoming stronger in the process. Dawn is essentially about reaching ultimate happiness, notwithstanding loss and grief, and not wasting one's life. The powerful element of the sea is prominent raising ambivalent feelings representing infinity, change, terror and passing of time. How do we keep afloat on this restless sea? How do we throw ourselves hopefully into the future to await the incoming tide, whether of joy or sorrow? How do we find our moorings and anchors? Harriet Adams explores the most crucial events in our lives. For example, she shows how marriage, when not a haven of peace, can turn into a yoke of tyranny. And, how this long oppression and waste of each other's lives can be the result of insisting on braving one's way through marriage as the mind slowly loses its discerning elasticity - a crushed nature that dares not rise and assert its rights. New beginnings are seen as growth: throwing off the old, without the fear of losing the grasp on it, and taking on the new means being full of life and living as if it were always daylight, like Dawn. Dawn herself epitomises the new - a result of pain and sorrow, when at the break of day, her mother Alice gives birth to her and calls her Dawn upon the realisation that she will soon die from complications of childbirth and her daughter will live on in her stead. Rather than tread the broad roads to self-pity and bitterness, Dawn embraces happiness by continually dipping into her buried life within, turning the dark atmosphere of the human soul into rays of light as she deals with the bitter sediments of doubt, jealousy, bias and fear which at times return deeper and stronger over her hope and optimism. She develops the gentle but powerful receptive nature which allows her to see beyond, letting beauty flow into her soul and bringing aspirations of strength to others. This book mellows and softens all lines and angles so that by the end receptive readers are left with interior peace.
