Minrose Gwin’s bewitching novel, Beautiful Dreamers, covers a lot of ground: lost innocence and found strength, the gifts life takes away and the gifts it gives in return, the lies that hold you back and the lies you run toward. But most of all, it’s about a mother and a daughter and the connection that never lets you go. “Each day now my mother wraps herself around me like a fur cape,” confesses narrator Memory Feather. “Each morning when I rise she comes up behind me, flings her arms wide, and leaps onto my shoulders, buttoning herself around my throat and chest, heavy and hot and wild.”
After her father leaves them for another woman, Memory and her mother, Virginia, struggle until Virginia reluctantly returns them to her childhood home, a town called Belle Cote, nestled on the Gulf Coast’s Mississippi Sound. The asthmatic Memory, who is in fourth grade in 1953, takes to their new environment as if she was bred to it: “When I finally tumbled off the train at the Belle Cote depot that muggy September night and fell into my grandparents’ unfamiliar arms, a warm wet breeze slapped me awake. My sinuses popped gloriously open at the scent of salt, and I took my first deep breath in a year. It was as if I’d been given a set of gills.”
Memory is an unusual child who has trouble making friends. Her clenched hand — “gnarled and tangled as an old cottonwood” — is missing two fingers, but she suspects it’s the reason she can hear the thoughts of animals and plants. It’s a gift she associates with her polyglot father: “I began to hear things other people could not. To be precise, nonhuman creatures and sometimes even plants conversed with me. It was as if, upon his departure from our lives, my father had left a door ajar. I slipped through it unawares, becoming, like him, a translator in the process.”
Virginia Feather is a complicated woman — prone to sudden rages, at times fiercely protective of Memory and, at other times, barely aware of her existence — and Virginia’s relationship with her disapproving parents is rocky on the best of days. But Memory is soon introduced to her mother’s lifelong best friend, Mac McFadden, who bursts into their dreary existence bearing unconditional love, joyful hospitality, and a crucial element of fun. He becomes an essential and enduring part of Memory’s life, as well as her mother’s and, despite Mac’s sexual orientation, the three form a family of sorts.
But their lives take a disturbing turn when Mac brings home a handsome young man named Tony Amato. Memory says, “It wasn’t just his beauty … He also had a certain alchemy. How do I explain the way I hated and distrusted him one minute and adored him the next? … There was something about Tony that compelled.” Before long, the narcissistic drifter has insinuated himself into every aspect of their lives, creating ripples of anxiety, jealousy, and desire around each of them. The teenaged Memory is unable to fully understand the confusing and dangerous situations that trusted humans in her life have either created or allowed. Luckily, Mac’s cat Minerva knows a rat when she sees one.
The adult Memory’s wonderful narrative voice, as she looks back on the events of her life in Belle Cote, includes Gwin’s exquisitely lyrical descriptions and perfectly apt metaphors, painting an atmosphere that is both open to the endless sea and sky and simultaneously claustrophobic in its damp heat, dark foreboding, and threat of sudden violence. “Some stories walk right off the page,” Gwin writes. “They meander down a dark street like drunken men. At the water’s edge, they take off their clothes and fold them carefully. Then they walk into the water, wading out onto the long shelf as dawn breaks. When the shelf gives way, they begin to swim. Should you be walking along the shore, you can see them bobbing out there, riding the swells. You shade your eyes and watch as they disappear into the smear between land and sea. Then all you have is a pile of old clothes and memory.” And Memory.
Tina Chambers has worked as a technical editor at an engineering firm and as an editorial assistant at Peachtree Publishers, where she worked on books by Erskine Caldwell, Will Campbell, and Ferrol Sams, to name a few. She lives in Chattanooga.
Tagged: Book Reviews, Fiction
