Sweet Dreams are Made of This Book

"Let me tell you about how my life changed, about how I got my house, my man, my freedom." Helena, orphaned at an early age and now living with her uncle, discovers that her father has left her a legacy, detailed in three letters, but the freedom they promise her brings also a self-consciousness about her elevation into adulthood, about the choices she makes in love and in life. "How on earth was I supposed to know when "becoming and adult" had happened?" she asks herself--and Sweet Dreams are Made of This follows her emergence from adolescence and the intertwining of her life with those of two others: her lover-to-be, Dominic and the disturbed and solitary Adam, who becomes obsessed with Helena after a chance encounter. "My dreams could wind themselves around her like a chain of scars around a wrist", Adam fantasises, but his is a world filled with admiration for serial killers and outsider art, and his dreams threaten to invade the growing bond between Helena and Dominic.Margaret Burt's first novel reads, in places, like two books shoehorned together, albeit somewhat awkwardly: one is a closely observed account of the trials and clumsy blossoming of an intense first love and the heroine's struggle for self-definition and self-determination; the other a less successful narrative of a young sociopath (equally struggling for self-definition) fixating his bizarre fantasies on the young lovers. The first renders teenage solipsism with realistic detail; the second veers into the more lurid and occasionally tasteless, sensibilities of the contemporary thriller. Burt's breathlessly chatty prose (switching between first-person narratives and peppered with direct comments to the reader) mirrors the emotional gaucheness of her principal characters, while her device of heading chapters with astrological quotations is presumably intended to reflect the adolescent urge for psychological certainties: in Sweet Dreams are Made of This we encounter a writer capable of rendering the anxieties of youth with a sympathetic eye. --James BarryRead More