Aftermath of Dreaming

January 23, 2006
A southern belle gone awry, Yvette Broussard admits to "some Daddy issues"—the ultimate understatement of this honestly written but cringe-inducing debut novel. Twenty-nine years old and finally making it as a jewelry designer in Los Angles, Yvette is afloat. But she's still mourning her father's decades-past disappearance and her mother's death three years earlier, and she wakes up screaming from nightmares more often than not. When she sees her ex-lover, movie star Andrew Madden (29 years her senior), at a movie premier, her world falls into breathless disarray. Segue into 350 pages of pathos detailing her self-destructive on-again-off-again 10-year relationship with controlling, remote, seductive, unavailable Andrew. Beginning with their first liaison, when she was a starving 18-year-old artist/restaurant hostess in New York, fresh from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Michel charts the lovesick obsession that brings Yvette winging across the country to join Andrew and keeps her waiting drunkenly by the phone. Though Michel conjures a credible voice for her unfortunate protagonist, watching Yvette waste her life and self-esteem is like witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.