Saturday Review: “Snake in the Grass” a review by Barbara Bennett of Minrose Gwin’s novel, Beautiful Dreamers (2024) in NCLR Online Winter 2025
Another early look at a review in the forthcoming NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue, the first from our Feature Section!
“We all know the story of Paradise. We all know it can’t last–and we know why.” Minrose Gwin’s novel, Beautiful Dreamers is told from the perspective of Memory Feather’s future self. Bennett writes, “Because Memory is writing this as her future self, and the readers are made aware that something terrible is going to happen, reading this book is like watching a horror film and finding yourself yelling at the actors on the screen, ‘Don’t go into the basement!’ Yet, we know they will. If they didn’t, there would be no story. We would leave the theater feeling cheated. And Minrose Gwin is not about to cheat us out of a captivating story.
Beautiful Dreamers tells Mem’s story on the Gulf Coast, “during a time before high-rise casinos and before Hurricane Betsy and Camille and before Dupont began polluting the water, the land, and all its wildlife,” with her mother and her mother’s friend, Mac. Introduced to this Paradise, as Mem’s grandfather calls it, is Mac’s new “friend” Tony Amato, the “proverbial serpent in Eden.” Bennett writes, “Deftly written and beautiful to the ear, Minrose Gwin has given us a story of paradise that is at once timeless and timely. What a lovely world we have been given, and yet we have destroyed Paradise with prejudice and hate, with pollution and greed. It is a tale worth reading and considering long after we have finished the final page.”
Read the preview from the Online Winter 2025 issue! And order the book from Hub City Press.
