Review by Booklist Review
Watson (The Committee, 2020) resurrects his principal characters, Travis and Delia, from his 2002 novel Sweet Dream Baby. Travis, now 18, is being released from reform school after six years of incarceration. Finally free, he makes an abortive trip to San Francisco and then heads to Panama City, Florida, for a reunion with his 24-year-old Aunt Delia, with whom he is obsessed for reasons that will gradually be revealed. Meanwhile, Travis has taken a job as a busboy at a restaurant where he meets a 16-year-old girl named Dawnell, who is trouble, and befriends the Black cook Emil, who is not. Dangerous complications inevitably ensue, some of which presume too much knowledge on the reader's part. As was the case with the earlier novel, too many of the characters are familiar types, but, happily, that is not the case with Travis, Dawnell, and Emil, who come alive on the page. Watson does a good job with atmosphere, too, in this noirish coming-of-age novel whose convoluted plot will keep the pages turning.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in the mid-1960s, Watson's captivating sequel to 2002's Sweet Dream Baby takes emotionally confused 18-year-old Travis Hollister, who has spent six years in a Nebraska reform school atoning for crimes he committed in the earlier book, home to Panama City, Fla., where he finds work as a busboy at a seafood restaurant. Still haunted by his troubled childhood and the sins of his past, including stabbing a boy in self-defense, Travis looks to reunite with Delia, his brazen aunt whom he idolized and fell in love with when he was 12 and she was 16. Years after their illicit liaison, Delia wants forgiveness and for them both to continue moving on separately. Meanwhile, Travis finds an opportunity for salvation helping Dawnell Briscoe, a "knock-out" of about 16 he meets one night outside the restaurant, escape the confines of her abusive family and their gossipy close-knit community for something grander. Watson evocatively blends the dreamy, hormonally addled banality of teen life with the existential anxieties of lost innocence and regret. Fans of S.E. Hinton's rough-hewn teens and the gothic noir of Tennessee Williams will welcome this bittersweet tale of redemption. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
After six years in a Nebraska reform school, 18-year-old Travis Hollister heads south during the Lyndon Johnson era to get back with the illicit woman of his dreams only to become involved with another teenager. When Travis was 12, he had a brief but intense romance with Delia--his 16-year-old aunt--before being sent up for a stabbing. In Florida, which "gets the crazies...because it's the last place you can go in one direction and still be American," he discovers that she has married an opportunistic Panama City lawyer but still is as obsessed with him as he is with her. While biding his time as a busboy, Travis encounters trouble in the form of Dawnell, a 16-year-old in a faded white party dress who "smokes like a thirty-year-old woman sitting on a barstool waiting for her future to walk in the door in a Palm Beach suit." Between secret meetings with Delia, he becomes Dawnell's protector and boyfriend-in-waiting, shaking off warnings about her from his seasoned co-worker Emil and hard-drinking, bighearted landlady, the Widow. Dotted with AM hits by the likes of Otis Redding and the Isley Brothers, the book unfolds like a fever dream, marked by good memories (riding with Delia in her white '54 Chevy with the radio on) and bad (the deaths of two boys she knew). "Like a rip current that takes your feet from under you and sweeps you out past the markers before you can wave at the shore, time comes to us again," Watson writes. Ultimately, this book is about freedom: "What is America if not a place where you can write your own story?" An atmospheric coming-of-age story equally touched by noir and Southern soul. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
