Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

When her old friend, Ricky Maulders, who is dying of cancer, visits artist Dorothea Howard, he discovers she s being held captive by the magical power of one of her own creations that she refuses to let go of, and haunted by the ghost of a judge in post-Revolution France. Dorothea insists that all she wants is to be left alone. But then three Chicano teens on the run from the police and a gaggle of summer-school students violently enter Dorothea's life, and she s confronted with all the messy stuff (like ''politics'') she's always sought to avoid.

In her introduction to the novel, Delia Sherman writes For me, Dorothea Dreams is the most purely beautiful of [Suzy McKee Charnas's] novels. It is certainly the one that speaks most directly to my own fears and obsessions. When I read it, I am proud to be a woman, proud to be an artist, even proud to be asthmatic and mortal and fallible, because they're all part of being human. And that's what art and literature are about, aren't they? The glory and shame of the human condition...

Suzy McKee Charnas is the author of the four-novel Holdfast Chronicles, The Vampire Tapestry, and Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms and has been honored with the Hugo, Nebula, and James Tiptree Jr. Awards. She lives in New Mexico.