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by Minrose Gwin
From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family.
It's 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia's childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory ("Mem") is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.
While Mac's wealth, brains, and good humor have allowed him to carve out a niche in Belle Cote, his position as a gay man active in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement exposes him to censure, harassment, and even brutality. When the unscrupulous and charismatic Tony Amato arrives in Belle Cote as Mac's "guest," he sets in motion a series of events that will shatter familial bonds and forever change Mem's life. Now, an adult Mem recounts the story of the scars Tony left in her teenage years, confronting her culpability in the disastrous events of that final summer.
Sweeping, dramatic, and vividly rendered, Beautiful Dreamers is a novel of innocence and betrayal, love and intolerance, and the care and honesty we owe the families we choose.
"Belle Cote and its Gulf of Mexico locale are richly evoked, as is New Orleans, and the author handles suspense deftly. Memory's witty voice moves convincingly between a child's innocence and a teenager's dawning awareness—sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying—of adulthood. [A] compelling story of love, betrayal, and identity." —Kirkus Reviews
"With luscious prose, sharply drawn characters, and a dash of magical realism, Gwin's atmospheric novel confronts both prejudice and the price we pay for protecting our loved ones." —Booklist
"Beautiful Dreamers is a haunting historical novel whose memorable heroine further illuminates a troubled period in the South." —Foreword Reviews
"Minrose Gwin's Beautiful Dreamers was a dream from which I didn't want to wake, a novel set in the vivid world of 1950s Gulf Coast Mississippi, peopled with complex and charismatic characters who together redefine family. Gwin is a skillful, compassionate, wise storyteller, one who finds hope in the antidotes to violence and hate: family and love, truth and justice. I have been a fan of Minrose Gwin's work for years, and Beautiful Dreamers is, hands down, my favorite: a book that I couldn't put down and didn't want to end." —Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World
This information about Beautiful Dreamers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Minrose Gwin is the author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. Her fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, has just been released by Hub City Press. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother's life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was coeditor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal. She received the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Richard Beale Davis Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters and the William Wisdom/William Faulkner Books-in-Process Award for Rescue, the novel she's working on now.
Like the characters in her novel Promise, Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was Kenan Eminent Professor of English. She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, and several loquacious four-leggeds. For more information, see minrosegwin.com.
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