Foreign travel is about learning to exist in a dreamy state of in-between-ness. Unknown and ungrounded, you wander through strange environs seeing strange faces, and yet the ever-resourceful mind manages to seize upon vague familiarities, constructing a hybrid place that has the eerie quality of a dreamscape. So we find our main character, Jenny, on a cruise ship in China in Michelle Richmond’s debut novel Dream of a Blue Room. Tense and insomniac, Jenny has traveled here on a dual mission: to resolve her collapsing marriage one way or the other, and to scatter the ashes of her murdered childhood best friend. As in all good stories that unfold on a plane, train, bus, or ship (with a nod to the Hitchcockian principle), Jenny soon finds her task complicated by the pull she feels towards Graham, a fellow traveler she meets who has his own reasons for making this voyage.

Richmond excels in conjuring that state of heightened, dream-like awareness fueled by lack of sleep and periods of intense emotional stress. Her deft descriptions of the Chinese landscape and Yangtze serve as a context for Jenny’s extended meditation on her own riverside childhood in Alabama and the history of her failing marriage. The two settings and time periods are ambitiously and successfully interwoven, much to Richmond’s credit. She is as en point in her descriptions of Chinese river dolphins, funeral ceremonies, and elderly tea shop ladies as she is in her descriptions of tubing, Sunday School, and watermelons in Mobile. Much more than travel fiction, this is instead a story of growing up as an outsider in the South, revealed through contrast—like looking at the negatives of a series of photos in order to see what you couldn’t have noticed otherwise. In this way, China triggers a reflection on Jenny’s life back home, proof of the idea that one understands home the best when away from it. We realize very quickly that Jenny’s relationship with the murdered Amanda Ruth was more than a mere friendship. Richmond beautifully describes the intimacy, both physical and emotional, between two girls during the pivotal period of late adolescence, as well as the grinding forces of Southern culture and religion that threatened this intimacy.

For the most part, Richmond’s prose has a lovely lyricality. She is at her best when describing situations with clarity and simplicity—she has a keen sense of place, an eye for details like how the raindrops fall at a particular instant. Richmond is a sensual writer and on occasion, her writing can veer towards the overripe, particularly when describing erotic moments. There could have been fewer oversignified descriptions of sex, and the book would have been none the worse for it. Throughout most of the novel, however, Richmond’s touch is far subtler, allowing a memory of a summer afternoon in a boathouse or a Chinese funeral procession to do no more symbolic load bearing than warranted.

As the cruise ship eases down the river, the reality of Jenny’s ending marriage becomes apparent even as her relationship with newcomer Graham rapidly progresses. It is through this new, albeit short-lived relationship with Graham and the drastic act he requests of her that Jenny is ultimately able to exit her suspended state. With the slow build-up of a mystery, the exquisite pain of a coming-of-age novel, the masterful images of a travel writer, and a darkness that is true to the Southern Gothic, Dream of a Blue Room is a work of wonderfully chimeric form. And through this, a novelistic form that skillfully defies a single genre, Richmond, quite fittingly, tells the story of a woman finding her way out of the boundaries of singular categories, out of limbo, out of the in-between.