Sweet Dream Baby [Hardcover]

Watson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

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

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (Nov.) Forecast: Regional sales in the South could start this novel on a word-of-mouth upswing. 150,000 first printing.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Watson serves up a familiar stew of small-town intrigue and southern Gothic in this coming-of-age novel. It is the 1950s, and 11-year-old Travis is sent to spend the summer with his grandparents in tiny Widow Rock, Florida, while his mother recovers from a nervous breakdown. There he meets his 16-year-old Aunt Delia, a beautiful, reckless girl who is--you guessed it--hiding a terrible secret. Lonely for his mother, Travis is immediately entranced by the dreamy and capricious Delia, and the two form a kind of alliance against the conservatism and insularity of the town. As Travis becomes increasingly obsessed with Delia, their relationship arouses suspicion and jealousy among her bevy of teenage admirers, with catastrophic results for all concerned. Watson effectively creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and menace, but with the exception of Travis and Delia, the characters (spoiled rich kid, brooding loner, stern and forbidding sheriff) are too one-dimensional to spark any unusual interest. Still, Watson's brisk pace will keep readers turning the pages through to the predictably melodramatic conclusion. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark; First Edition edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140220017X
• ISBN-13: 978-1402200175
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,188,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sterling Watson is The Peter Meinke Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Eckerd College. He and Dennis Lehane are Co-directors of the Eckerd College Writers' Conference: Writers in Paradise.

Watson is the author of six novels: Weep No More My Brother, The Calling, Blind Tongues, Deadly Sweet, Sweet Dream Baby and Fighting in the Shade.

Watson is the recipient of three Florida Fine Arts Council Awards for fiction writing. His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review. His main professional interests are fiction, play and screenwriting, American and British and European short and long fiction, and the theatre. He served for five years as the fiction editor of The Florida Quarterly, and taught secondary English and later fiction writing at Raiford Prison.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Happily, spookily imprisoned by the story, July 27, 2005

By 

C. Stites (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Dream Baby (Paperback)

I read Sweet Dream Baby a few weeks ago, during a period of much stress & strife, and I loved it because I could get totally lost in it and in Travis' wonderful voice (also the great use of popular songs). I quickly ordered Sterling Watson's earlier book from Amazon, but was sorry to find no sequel that would allow me to see if and how Travis and the rest of his seemingly normal (at first), bizarre, sad family navigate the rest of their lives. Fun to read, beautifully written, thought-provoking, disturbing.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Sweet Dream Baby," More Racy Than Sweet, November 2, 2002

By 

Booms (Nobodyland, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Dream Baby (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keep The Dream Alive, July 28, 2005

By 

Adam Smith (Cape Cod) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Dream Baby (Paperback)

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!