“Beautiful Dreamers” by Minrose Gwin, Hub City Press, 285 pages
After a divorce leaves her family “literally high and dry” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Memory Feather and her mother Virginia move to a motel across town where her mother tries to scrape by as a maid, cleaning toilets. It’s not a great life. Things sometimes catch on fire, and Memory is functionally a latchkey kid who has to take care of her mother when she makes questionable decisions. That is until Memory’s grandparents hire a private detective to track them down and bring them home.
Minrose Gwin’s latest atmospheric novel, “Beautiful Dreamers,” follows Memory as she grows up in the fictional Mississippi Gulf Coast town, Belle Cote, starting in 1953. Her mother and her childhood best friend Mac form an unconventional family unit amid the backdrop of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. All this is disrupted by Tony, the charming but untrustworthy titular beautiful dreamer, who catalyzes a series of events that change Memory’s life forever. This is Gwin’s fourth novel, and like most of her characters, she’s from Mississippi.
Memory is not your average girl, in more ways than one. She was born with two fingers missing from her twisted left hand which she calls her “paw.” She can also communicate with plants and animals.
Ostensibly, the book is narrated by an adult version of Memory, but the perspective is largely recounted with her thoughts at the time. Gwin captures the young and precocious child well. The book shines in Memory’s descriptions of what’s happening, and she is genuinely smart. Though there are times when you really wish she could be a little more aware. Despite living with a gay man in a time and place filled with rampant homophobia, she’s largely ignorant about the world around her — and she accidentally participates in a prank which outs two of her female teachers as a couple, causing them to leave town.
Not to excuse the behavior, but who among us hasn’t looked back at our pretween years and cringed a little at decisions that seemed smart at the time because of what we didn’t know? Gwin masterfully captures the limited perspective of a tween caught in a tumultuous time.
People don’t often think about themselves as living through history. Events may be happening around them, but they’re paying bills, eating with friends and falling in love.
“Beautiful Dreamers” is an opportunity to look back at a time one might only know through main historic events recounted in history books, made real and strange when visited from fresh eyes. Memory’s narration is not always reliable but full of the insight only children who have been forced to grow up young can muster. She wants for things to be better and doesn’t fully understand how bad things are.
Both things can be true.
There’s something very “To Kill a Mockingbird” meets “Gilmore Girls” about the whole thing. Lovers of literary fiction will enjoy the rich world building. Gwin’s Belle Cote feels almost tangible, and the characters, while not always likable, are full and lived in. They have complicated feelings and relationships, and the adults in Memory’s life don’t always live up to everything they want to be. In the end, things don’t all work out nicely. Memory is forced to do some growing up and becomes disillusioned by the world around her, but she’s still able to persist in beautifully dreaming.
Minrose Gwin will be at the Louisiana Book Festival on Nov. 2. For more information visit: https://www.louisianabookfestival.org/