Customer Reviews

Dream House: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was at the store to get other books and just picked this up on a whim. To be honest, I purchased this book only because it is based in Ann Arbor - which is where I live. However, I found that it is the type of book that has kept me up because I keep wanting to see what happens next. It is also the type of book that causes one to pause and reflect on which aspects in the characters are a part of the reader as well.
As far as style, I really like the way the author weaves together story lines of several different people using both flashbacks and current writing. Over the arc of the story the various details build into a tightly woven piece. That component reminds me of a John Irvine or Pat Conroy book. However, the writing is faster paced.
I think this book will appeal to a wide range of people. Ironically, my biggest complaint is that I think she may have gone a little overboard with bringing up Ann Arbor details. It helps for a local, but I think repeated references to certain streets or "the diag" might a get a little distracting if I were not local. Then again, maybe I only notice it because I am local. In any case, I look forward to reading future books from the author.

I thoroughly enjoyed this plot and the characters she developed. Being that this is her first novel, I look forward to more books by Valerie Laken because I believe she'll take more chances next time. She is a great writer and has the potential to turn out some fantastic stories. The description of "ghost story" on the book will throw people off if they're looking for a book about actual ghosts or hauntings; it's more of a metaphorical description. I couldn't put it down.

If you're looking for a cheap, mindless thriller, look elsewhere...Dream House is a literary work that explores the dynamics of marriage, family life, and the walls we put up between one another. The most intriguing thing about this book is Laken's ability to balance the traumas of a handful of characters while maintaining a gripping plotline. I was grateful that she neither forfeited plot for character nor vice versa. Overall, a really great read and compelling story.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It starts off like a black culture vs. white culture story but turns into an account of how a moment of misguided passion destroyed lives and sent a man, Walker, to prison, When he gets out, he goes back to the house that "should have been his" and finds that a white woman has completely gutted it, leaving nothing of his family behind. The woman, Kate, has problems of her own. Her husband has left her high and dry to do the hard work of renovating her new house. She struggles with her relationship to her family and everyone else in her life. The author brings in other interesting characters like the white ex-minister who has given Walker a place to stay and Jay, the man who cleaned up the crime scene many years ago and now has ties to Kate because she has his dog. Alot of plot lines with a bitter-sweet ending.

Married couple Kate and Stuart Kinzler have enjoyed hanging on to their college lifestyle though they graduated seven years ago. However, as she closes in on thirty, Kate wants more than a rundown Ann Arbor apartment and all night parties. Reluctantly Stuart agrees it is time to commit to their relationship, but loathes such a permanent fixture like a house. With the help of her parents, they buy a fixer-upper; but are ignorant that almost two decades earlier in the summer of 1987 a murder occurred in their new abode.

As Kate dives into the renovation project, Stuart walks out of the home and her. Despondent over the apparent end of her marriage Kate keeps working on the house. She soon meets African-American Walker Price who grew up in her new home before going to jail as a teen for the homicide almost twenty years ago, and her friend Jay comes by realizing upon arrival he cleaned the house after the police finished their murder investigation.

This is a timely look at the American strategic vision of individual ownership as the house serves as the connection between four thirtyish adults. The link between the Kinzlers and Walker is obvious; however the tie to Jay is a major stretch that is asking a lot of the reader to accept. Still this is a deep character driven tale as Valerie Laken goes inside the underpinnings of owning one's DREAM HOUSE with a strong look into the bonds that make effective nurturing relationships.

Harriet Klausner

Although this novel starts out with the aftermath of a brutal murder in a ramshackle house in a quiet street of a suburb near Ann Arbor, much of the focus soon turns to newly married twenty something Kate and Stuart who, seven years out of college and nearly twenty years later, purchase the house with the best of intentions, hoping that it will somehow help rejuvenate the insecure threads of their marriage. Although Kate and Stuart are aware that some kind of scandal once rocked the house, Kate, in particular proves to ever-more industrious, having a weak spot for improvement projects as she fanatically sets about demolishing walls and pulling up floors, renovating and remodeling from the bottom up.

While Kate's authoritarian father, a lucrative housing developer, encourages Kate and Stewart to have a home of their own, even he can't believe that the couple would purchase this particular house. Yet Kate, who believes in the power and the responsibility of humans to fix what is wrong with the world, is fanatical in her desire to remake the two story clapboard box, doing things with an eerily magical speed and efficiency: "it was as if she and the house had developed their own code." Amidst the plaster and the lath, the drywall and the stripper, the place explodes, throwing both Kate and Stuart in different directions. Stuart remains haunted by his childhood and his life with his autistic brother Danny, while Kate battles her family, and the pressures of the upcoming wedding with her far more successful sister. Suffering a meltdown, fired from his job and fed up with Kate's plans for change, Stuart rejects "the queasy fun-house slipperiness to it all," vanishing into the country. Only Kate is left to shoulder the burdens of their dream house.

As Kate and Stuart's predicament unfolds, Laken's effortless novel moves to that of Walker Price who cannot let go of the house that has become much more than cement stone, wood and insulation. Walker was only eighteen when he has walked into the corner ice-cream shop with the gun, put it down in the counter. Released from prison after eighteen years hard time, Walker now takes charity from a kindly Reverend Howard, only eight blocks away from Macon street, so close to his home, where he remains preoccupied by the events of that night, and the rapid violence unleashed involving his broken-down mother and the man that was physically abusing her.

Walker has never said sorry for the terrible events that rocked their lives and the memories of his dead brother Jerome who was there that fateful night. As Kate and Walker form an unlikely duo, eventually accompanied by Jay, another pivotal character who also remembers that terrible time when he was employed as a type of industrial cleaner, and his girlfriend Claire who had a morbid fascination with the crime scene. After Claire vanished, Jay still keeps the two black-and white pictures, eerie and artful of his crazed face, and his own blurry hand bearing down on Claire. The author writes with flashes of dark insight, threading her narratives together throughout in a tightly spiraled plot, while the house becomes a powerful and shocking allegory for her character's shattered inner lives. In a narrative full of suspense and drama, the climax results from an unexpected tragedy where this house, important to so many lives, is eventually purged of tragedy. All of the characters, Walker in particular, are forced into a painful and hard- won redemption. Mike Leonard March 09.

I got this book (hardback) at my library. The cover, the title and panel all made it up to be this "dark" novel full of mystery and thriller events. It was simply a novel. I see that the paperback cover now fits the lukewarm story better. The hardback I had sold it like a thriller. If you want to read a good ghost story try "No Doors, No Windows" by Joe Schreiber. Now that's a great thriller about a house and it's secrets.

While it was a decent story, it just was a story. One about how houses can hold meaning to people that are a part of it and it did connected characters nicely to tell it. But if you're looking for edge of your seat suspense then this is not the book for you. The ending was not "climactic". It was just a way to end the story and it let me down a little. Kind of like going to the ice cream shop for a chocolate malt and having to settle for a vanilla cone. You're craving for ice cream is fulfilled but you are still left wanting some chocolate.

It was a book about race and social classes? To me it was simply a book about a woman buying a house in a neighborhood that coincidentally used to house black families in 1987 nonetheless, not 1957. It wasn't some tale about white people taking over a black neighborhood. They were simply a young married couple starting out and buying a house to fix up that they could afford. The only character that even touches on the race issue is the black character. When the main character Kate meets him it's not that she's allowing a "black man" in her home, but a STRANGE man. She doesn't even interact with her white neighbors, but is outwardly open to the black man in the story so I'm still scratching my head over the whole "race" thing. I just didn't see it.

I don't rate too many books with 5 stars. This novel deserves it. For a first novel, especially, I'm blown away. I don't think I've ever read a book where I could actually picture what the characters looked like--it's not something I do. But these people all seemed like people I should know, so they got faces in my imagination. Very realistic and contemporary and relevant.

This book drew me in from the start - with its creepy prologue. I love a mystery, but more than that, I love a good character driven novel and I definitely found that in Dream House. This is the sort of novel that slowly releases its secrets to you - keeping you at the edge of your seat and anxious to know what happened and why.

The main characters, Kate and Walker are both obsessed with this house. Kate - has always felt that she's been a disappointment to her family and feels that by immersing herself in fixing up her new home is a way to redeem herself in their eyes. Walker grew up in the same house before landing himself in jail for almost two decades. What was his purpose for returning?

There are various plot lines going on at once and they are all crucial to the outcome of this novel. The relationships Kate forges between Walker and Jay were really satisfying and essentially what I found the most interesting throughout the story. I love novels that blend past and present events and how it all comes together in the now and Ms. Laken definitely did this well.

For those of you looking for a ghost story - I think you will find one in Dream House, yet it's not a story about things that go bump in the night. This is a story of the ghosts of one's past, dealing with those ghosts and coming to terms with yourself, but most importantly it's about finding a place to call home.

I was very happy to have read Dream House and will definitely be on the lookout for any other titles from Valerie Laken.

I was hooked to this book by the cover at first sight.... and the title with the eerie letters reflecting in the water. When I read what the book was about I was sold out interested. A mystery! A murder mystery! A ghost story even! Yet who are the ghosts in this ghost story? Lingering pasts of Stuart and Kate.... dashed hops and dreams, ghosts of a marriage they once had - or dreamed they had? Possibly. Not the ghosts I had envisioned, but ghosts all the same.

The prologue was a bit much for me and if the book would have been based off those first few eighteen pages I probably would not have been able to finish the book. The character of Claire I found to be extremely unlikeable and desensitized. My stomach actually lurched at what the book described.

and then we move on to 2005... and with the story of Stuart and Kate comes a sigh of relief from me. I like them. I like Kate's dreams for the house and I can relat to that. As Kate remodels and remodels I start to wonder what is she really trying to fix? As Valerie Laken brings the pieces of this story as well as the characters together for a story that kept me turning the pages.

And really - what home, what person, doesn't have a few ghosts?