In an effort to do something about my toppling Mount Doom of backlist books, I am going to read one for every newer release I read. Not sure it will help, but maybe I will luck out and the majority of books languishing on my shelves will be as good as Sweet Dream Baby by Sterling Watson.

In this book, 12-year-old Travis Hollister is sent to Widow Rock, Florida to live with his paternal grandparents and 16-year-old aunt, Delia. It is 1958 and Travis’s father can’t cope. Travis’s mother is convalescing because, as Travis explains, “One day, I came home from school and found Mom curled up under the kitchen sink.” This will be the break everyone needs.

Travis’s grandparents are two sides of a coin: his grandmother is an effusive women, given to retreating to her room with headaches; his grandfather, the town sheriff, is a hard man who demands respect. The real surprise for Travis is his father’s much younger sister, Delia, whose smile “is like a sunrise over the wheat fields back in Omaha.”

Delia takes Travis everywhere and Travis is soon privy to things he doesn’t really understand. Ultimately, it makes this novel more than just the story of one boy’s coming of age. I blame Delia. Delia’s super power is her ability to wrap people, particularly men, around her little finger.

When Travis first meets Delia, he can see the effect she has on her father after she speeds into the garage, music blaring.

Grandpa Hollister’s eyes change. They look like I never expected them to. They say he doesn’t care about the loud radio or the reckless driving. Nobody’s gonna get arrested. They say he can’t do nothing about how he feels right now. Nothing at all.

It seems that every male who comes into Delia’s orbit, from Princeton-bound Bick Sifford, to the the local James Dean wannabe Kenny Griner, wants something from Delia. And soon, Travis wants something from her, too.

Sweet Dream Baby captures the innocence of youth, and the sharp tang of sexual longing and sets it all to the soundtrack of the music of the period. The book doesn’t go where you expect it to and ends up being quite a bit darker, too.

I loved every second of it.

You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face.

At just fifteen, Lex Gracie escapes her family home on Moor Woods Road, flags down a car and thus rescues her siblings from what is soon dubbed by the press as the “House of Horrors”. She is named Girl A to keep her identity secret from the world. Her siblings, Ethan, Evie, Gabriel, Delilah and Noah, are similarly named.

Now, years later, Lex, a lawyer based in NYC, is off to the prison where her mother has just died. Lex has been named executor of the estate, which is comprised of the house and a little bit of money. Lex feels the right thing to do is to build a community centre where the house stands, but in order to do that she needs her siblings to sign off. Abigail Dean’s accomplished debut Girl A traces Lex’s journey through the trauma of her past as she locates and visits with her siblings in an effort to secure their signatures.

Wisely, Dean chooses to leave much of what happens in the house to the reader’s imagination. It’s more than enough, trust me.

Sometimes, in my head, I visit our little room. There were two single beds, pressed into opposite corners, as far away from each other as they could be. My bed and Evie’s bed. A bare bulb hung between them and twitched at footsteps in the hallway outside. It was usually dull. but sometimes, if Father decided, it was left on for days. He had sealed a flattened cardboard box against the window, intending to control time, but a dim, brown light seeped through and granted us our days and nights.

The disintegration of the Gracie family doesn’t happen all at once, although the father, Charlie, is definitely volatile. As he becomes more and more evangelical – even going so far as to start his own church – he becomes more rigid and violent. Lex and Evie finds solace in a hidden book of Greek myths and school is a safe place until Charlie forbids them to go. Lex’s mother shrinks into the background, often disappearing for days into her bedroom to care for the newest baby.

Lex unspools the story of her childhood as she visits with each of her siblings, all adopted into different families after the rescue. Thus, this is a story about the aftermath of trauma as much as it is about the trauma itself. What becomes of these children makes for compelling reading.

Highly recommended.