Sweet Dream Baby
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Sent to live in the humidity of rural Florida with his grandparents and his sixteen-year-old Aunt Delia for the summer, twelve-year-old Travis becomes absorbed in the closed ways of small-town life. Captivated by Delia, Travis watches her attempt to find a place for herself in the socially stunted, gossip-driven town. Delia’s secrets go beyond what Travis can understand, but he believes that he alone can save her--a belief that not only forces him to grow up fast, but one that builds to a dangerous and disturbing climax. In trying to free Delia from her past, Travis leads her into a shocking present and a most uncertain future.
In a work at once honest, chilling and compulsively addictive, author Sterling Watson has created a time and place where rock ‘n’ roll hums from AM radios, steam rises from a secluded riverbed and violent summer storms threaten the peace of silent nights. Watson’s characters are brought vividly to life through Travis’s touching, powerful and intensely personal voice. A dark and evocative coming of age tale, Sweet Dream Baby begins steeped in innocence and ends in a dramatically different place.
“I can’t remember a book that sneaked up and grabbed me the way Sweet Dream Baby did. It’s a real shocker by a very good writer.”—Elmore Leonard
“Sterling Watson’s Sweet Dream Baby is one of the finest novels I’ve read in years, an incandescent blend of gothic noir, Faulknerian dreamscape and bittersweet coming-of-age story. Months after reading it, it haunts me still.”—Dennis Lehane
“Sterling Watson’s Sweet Dream Baby brings us the words and music, the tastes and smells of that special time—as well as its heartache and secret shame. I was utterly absorbed in these fierce pages.”—Fred Chappell, author of Look Back All the Green Valley
“Sweet Dream Baby is a beautiful book. Sterling Watson is surehanded and telling in a story that is as elegiac as it is gripping.”—Michael Connelly, author of Chasing the Dime
"Some delicious page-turning."—Kirkus Reviews
A Book Sense 76 Top 10 Selection
Named to Top Ten Crime Books of 2002, Toronto Globe and Mail
"Watson proves himself a first-rate storyteller."—Publishers Weekly
"A comprehensive work of art that is as thought-provoking as it is disturbing."—Orlando Sentinel
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's loss of innocence in the rock and roll 1950s parallels one boy's painful transformation into a man in Watson's affecting fifth novel (Deadly Sweet, etc.). Twelve-year-old Travis is having a tough childhood: his beloved Japanese mother is in a mental institution, leaving him in the care of his emotionally unavailable Marine father, and he is constantly tormented by a redneck teenage neighbor. His life changes dramatically when he leaves Omaha to spend the summer with his father's family in Widow Rock, Fla. Travis's grandfather is the town's stern sheriff, his grandmother is often bedridden with headaches or heat exhaustion and his saucy Aunt Delia ("the subject of eighty percent of all Widow Rock Gossip Reports") is a 16-year-old spitfire. Travis is smitten by her verve from the moment she screeches to a halt in her '55 Chevy, and aunt and nephew bond quickly. Delia trusts her secrets with Travis, and he gains a masculine sense of protectiveness as he learns about the power of sex, lust and violence. The novel's take on the social politics of a small Southern town is predictable, and the secondary characters tend to fall into stock categories (the arrogant rich boy, the tough but sensitive greaser), but this is easily forgivable because Watson portrays the rich relationship between Travis and Delia with convincing psychological detail. Besotted with Delia, Travis loses emotional control and commits an outrageous act. The suspense builds to an explosive ending, and Travis's coming of age is brutal, touching and memorable. While Watson breaks no new ground here, he proves himself a first-rate storyteller.