Description
A Globe and Mail Best Spring Book • One of Lambda Literary Review‘s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of June 2023
A queer coming-of-age—and coming-to-terms—follows the after-effects of betrayal and poignantly explores the ways we search for home.
When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.
Praise for Dreaming Home
“This queer coming-of-age, told as a series of interlinked stories from six points of view over a 40-year period, is based in part on the author’s experiences in AIDS-era San Francisco. American-born, Toronto-based Lucian Childs, as you’ll glean from that last detail, came of age some time ago, but is still embracing new rites of passage: Though his stories have appeared in literary journals since the early aughts, he’s making his book-publishing debut at the tender age of 74.”
—Globe and Mail
“Childs is an excellent writer, with a keen ear for dialogue and great skill in depicting the complexities of emotional conflict … His characters are living souls, and life being what it is, they will continue to struggle to find happiness.”
—Ottawa Review of Books
“Childs’ ruthlessly genuine depiction of Kyle through these narratives is illustrative of a smart and thoughtful engagement with the simultaneity of a person whose sense of self is moulded by their suffering.”
—The Miramichi Reader
“The marvel of Childs’ small book is its sharp, heartbreaking examination of how the people we love are also affected by our trauma, are witnesses sometimes to it, and live in its lifetime of complex, difficult reverberations, all from that singular hurtful moment, that seemingly insignificant choice in our past. Childs understands the true gravity of trauma, extending beyond just the traumatized individual to the friends, family, and lovers beside us, and in these six dazzling, entwined stories he maps their orbits around their damaged polestar. Because of this, it’s their collective story—each character’s voice amplifying the others—that glows the brightest.”
—Patrick Earl Ryan, author of the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning short story collection, If We Were Electric
“Both intimate and far-reaching, Dreaming Home movingly explores how people change, and how they don’t; how they heal, and how they can’t … or maybe still can. There is seemingly no life Childs can’t dream his way into, and every character in this beautiful book is drawn with empathy and tenderness.”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations
“Dreaming Home is nothing short of a conjuring act. In Kyle, Lucian Childs has created a living, suffering man out of negative space. Yet we come to know him, and feel for him, thanks to the cast of funny and flawed characters whose lives he touches. Through their love, exasperation, and remorse, the void that is Kyle miraculously takes on its human shape. Entertaining and wise, Dreaming Home is wonderful debut.”
—Caroline Adderson, author of Bad Imaginings and A History of Forgetting
“Dreaming Home is the propulsive tale of how one act of cruelty can reverberate through many lives and for many decades. Childs intricately and carefully brings to life the constellation of characters who circle around Kyle and his queer coming of age. Dreaming Home poses brilliant and important questions, forcing the reader to consider the power we have over one another and the twisted and painful paths life can take toward joy.”
—Lydia Conklin, author of Rainbow Rainbow
“In Dreaming Home, Lucian Childs constructs, from various perspectives, the life of Kyle—a young gay man traumatized early in life, first by his father and then by conversion therapy—who is searching for, as the title suggests, that most elusive of things: home. As he takes us from Texas to San Francisco to Florida, Childs brings it all—compelling prose, first-rate storytelling, and a bittersweet and utterly effecting renegotiation of the meaning of family.”
—Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade
Praise for Lucian Childs
“The stories of Lucian Childs are marked by their breath and diversity of characters—not just gender … but age, economics, level of education, and types of concerns and life problems. He can be funny, he can be poetic, but his humor is always the appetizer toward a main course of slightly darker journeys, of the sadness and even desperation that attends the exploration of identity.”
—Nancy Zafris, author of The Home Jar
