Sourcebooks 2004
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Sweet Dream Baby
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.
Elmore Leonard:
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.
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. The suspense builds to an explosive ending, and Travis's coming of age is brutal, touching and memorable. Watson ... proves himself a first-rate storyteller.
Dennis Lehane:
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.
Michael Connelly:
Sweet Dream Baby is a beautiful book. Sterling Watson is surehanded and telling in a story that is as elegiac as it is gripping.
Kirkus Reviews:
A southern boy's fantasy of coming of age under the guidance of his languorous older aunt could make this a sneaky sleeper.
Fred Chappell, author of Look Back All the Green Valley:
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 the fierce pages.