"As a memoirist, I believe in the transformative power of life stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom,” writes author Sonia Leung in the prologue to The Girl Who Dreamed.
Spanning the first 25 years of her life, The Girl Who Dreamed is Leung’s inspirational debut memoir. As she recounts the most significant moments in her upbringing—moving to Hong Kong as a child, being sexually assaulted by her table tennis coach at age 14, and running away from home to reinvent herself in Taiwan, to name a few—we learn more about who the author is and of what she is capable."
- Jada Seaton in Being Neighbourly
“On the face of it, the title of Sonia Leung’s new book suggests that her dreams were something like aspirations – something that she was able to achieve despite the barriers that she encountered in the first few decades of her life. In addition to such ‘aspiration’, though, another face of her dreams can be understood by looking at the familial relationships of the word itself and how its DNA mutated during the violent Norse invasions of Britain. Even if taking place outside of the strict etymologies of the terms, there is an interesting relationship to explore between the modern English word ‘dream’ (traum in standard German) and ‘trauma’ – which Leung also weaves into her memoir. Here, then, the shape of the narrative structure that makes The Girl Who Dreamed such a compelling read: a double helix of trauma and aspiration, linked by base pairs of lived experience and metacognitive reflection.”
—Paul C. Corrigan in Hong Kong Review of Books
