“There is a place, hidden among the sweeping sandy swaths of southern desert, where all you can see is red. From above, it’s a carpet of crimson, but as you lean closer, you see that it’s not one singular sheet of color, but rows upon rows of distinct red dots. Like a wild field of poppies. Except it’s nothing like that. Because the little red dots are not flowers, but people. People who journeyed many miles to get here. People who came here to sleep.”
Those are some lines from the opening to Nikki Erlick’s novel The Poppy Fields. The Poppy Fields is a experimental treatment center in a remote stretch of the California desert. A hundred thousand people have come to the facility to sleep for one or two months to try to ease the pain of grief.
Most people wake up with their grief lessened enough that they can get back to living their lives. A small percentage, though, wake up with no emotional attachment to the one they’re grieving.
As the story begins, three strangers begin a journey together after being grounded at the Kansas City airport. Ava, traveling with her dog, is a children’s book illustrator. Ray is a fireman whose brother died shortly after having slept at Poppy Fields. Shasa is an occupational therapist whose fiancée died shortly before their wedding. They agree to share the last rental car and drive to the California facility. They each have a different reason for wanting to visit the facility but bond over their individual sorrows over the course of the drive.
If you, too, have ever pondered the questions as the book jacket asks, “How do we heal in the wake of great loss? And how far are we willing to go in order to be healed?” then you must read The Poppy Fields by Nikki Erlick.
