Sweet Dream Baby

September 30, 2002
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.

October 1, 2002
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)