Book Description

The Garden of Sleeping Hammers is a novel about Katerina, a twenty-one year-old woman who meets a spy twice her age who offers to teach her anything she wants to know about spycraft and magic. This apprenticeship plunges her into an unconventional romance and a heightened state of psychic awareness. Her new identity inspires complete strangers, who are sure Katerina is destined for fame, but scares those who know the old Katerina. Katerina's family believes she's mentally ill and forces antipsychotic, antidepressant and mood-stabilizing medications upon her at the advice of a psychiatrist. The novel follows her struggle to maintain the heightened state of awareness and aliveness that she suddenly feels after years of depression, in the face of her family and friends urging her to come back down. What happens when a massive opportunity for personal growth is seen by others as a dangerous mistake? As a harrowing realization dawns on Katerina that she cannot argue her way out of the pit she has found herself in, nor convince her parents and psychiatrist that her enchanted reality is valid, she finds a disturbing power play emerging. Certain realities are not allowed - but why? The spy, one of Katerina's only remaining lifelines, denies her pleas for rescue and disappears, and Katerina falls deeper into a medicated haze. In the hope that she might be able to return to an extraordinary life, but with no guarantee, Katerina has no other choice than to use her recent spy training to play her parents and her psychiatrist, and to get an up-close, inside look at the state of mental health in mainstream America.