Sweet Dream Baby

This story is replete with seemingly simple descriptions that reflect the observations of any 12-year-old boy: women who touch their golden crucifixes when a preacher talks of loose women, small lizards that do push-ups in the back yard--but gradually, as the story creeps up on you, the images get darker, like Delia dancing alone to Sweet Dream Baby while on-lookers weep and the ghostly imagery of raging rain running like blood through the house's gutter, "pumping hard as it fights the storm." Reading some other reviews of this great book, it seems like a sequel is in the works. If that's true, bring it on!

Sterling Watson is an author everone needs to get to know. The only problem I had with this book, was that it ended. I want to know what becomes of these so compelling characters. We can only hope that the world can get its hands on a sequel, and soon! The writing is gorgeous. Sweet Dream Baby is an entirely believable (yet ultimately very dark) voyage into the mind of a young boy who slides from youthful, sweetness and innocense down into the murk of an adult world that is too much for him to handle. Travis will just break your heart and you'll thank Sterling Watson for making it happen.

Sweet Dream Baby is a fantastic book about a young boy trying to understand the puzzles and traumas of his life. I found myself unable to put the book down, and when I had to be pulled away from it, I kept thinking about the characters until I could go back to it again. The voice is incredible: the simple, innocent perspective of a twelve-year old boy in the 1950s. I'd follow him down any road he chose to walk, story-wise.

Sterling Watson's fifth novel, "Sweet Dream Baby," has the feel of a well built, well loved home at a time when most novels with bestseller potential are empty houses. Tom Waits sang that a house without love ain't nothing but a house where somebody lives. The characters of Watson's novel don't simply live in its pages; they bring those pages to life. Watson possesses a gigantic heart, and his characters are lucky to have him, lucky to be so loved.His twelve-year-old Travis Hollister comes of age in Widow Rock, a backwoods Florida Panhandle town. It's the 1950s, and wherever teenagers hang out, rock n' rollers like the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, shake nerves and rattle brains. The town elders just don't get it, and Travis nestles himself under the young wing of his Aunt Delia, a sixteen-year-old ingénue setting the cornerstones for a Southern Gothic love-quadrangle--pentangle if you count the undying paternal love of the Sheriff of Widow Rock, Travis's Grandpa Hollister.Grandpa Hollister is a character along the inscrutable and rigid lines of Thomas Sutpen in "Absalom, Absalom!" by William Faulkner. And Watson's portrait of small-town life on the far side of the Hiawassee River has the sultry air of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, depicted in "The Sound and the Fury" and elsewhere. The folks of Widow Rock are no less polite than their Mississippi counterparts; neither are they any less likeable for their peculiarities. Watson is a Southern writer tipping his hat to Sheriff Bill, but he is also an American writer who has channeled the spirit of a young nation in all its postwar, hip-twisting bravado and its infatuation with love in the midst of the baby boom.I was born in 1976, and "Sweet Dream Baby" made me nostalgic for the youth of my parents, the parking and cruising, drinking malts in juke joints, eating burgers and fries in the backseat of a souped-up street rod. Watson shows us these things again and for the first time through adolescent eyes. His novel is no less adult for the narrator's immaturity. The opposite is true; Travis's age makes for mature audiences because Travis grows up all too fast, comes of age to find himself lost in the kind of love that breaks spirits and psyches along with hearts. "Sweet Dream Baby" is more racy than sweet--the romance tale of a twelve-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, complete with a surprise ending as beautiful as it is tragic--an engrossing read bound to interrupt your daily life, leaving your errands undone and your work set aside. When your loved ones want to know what you've been doing and where you've been, tell them not to worry. Tell them you were in caring hands.