OUT TOMORROW

Thank you #partner @dreamscape_media for my #gifted ALC. 🎶 🎷

They Dream in Gold
By Mai Sennaar
Narrated by Julia Kwamya

They Dream in Gold is a sweeping historical fiction novel spanning two decades and multiple continents of the African diaspora, from the perspectives of two dreamers, hungry for belonging and a sense of home. Exploring complicated family dynamics, the late 1960s music scene, and the cross-continental experiences that have shaped these characters into who they are. Sennaar's writing is rich, vivid, and melodic, and narrator Julia Kwamya does an exceptional job bringing these attributes to the forefront with her performance. A wonderful book that I binged over the course of a single weekend. 🩷

📌 Available 7/30

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Thank you netgalley and dreamscape select for the ALC. My opinions are being left voluntarily. What a g4eat debut expertly weaved together interconnected emotional book. Iat timea i found it slow moving and wiah things conected together a bit faster i loved the opening.. the narrators did a fabulous job.

4.5/5☆

Debut??? Damn!

A generational-sweeping-interconnected story of a woman married to a musician in the late sixties clawing to make it in the jazz music world. The story jumps around in the timeline and tangents into other people’s stories and how they impact the main character Bonnie but the writing is captivating and smart which keeps you engaged and not confused.

It has mystery and social political commentary, love and romance and is very enjoyable.

Thanks to netgalley and Dreamscape media for an alc.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Select audio for the opportunity to listen to this ARC.

Mai Sennaar’s debut novel is beautifully polished and sophisticated in structure and narrative. Her brief prologue explains her need to write about the ´fusion’ of cultures that is so often overlooked by a focus on racial and cultural divisions, even within the racialized communities that were diffused across the globe by imperialism. In short, while many things divide us, ultimately we are all products of centuries of mixing, blending, and harmonizing as well as clashing.

The story spans roughly two decades. When it opens in 1969. nineteen year old Bonnie is heavily pregnant and living in a room above Mama Eva’s restaurant near Lausanne, Switzerland. There is a small Senegalese community settled there, along with others seeking new lives outside of Africa and the Middle East. They help each other, they exploit and are exploited, and they are at once free of many old world restraints while still dealing with new world racism, often ugly. Many, like Mama Eva, are illegal immigrants, living tensely between two worlds, ambivalent about going home but fearful of being forced to do so.

Bonnie is herself a product of different cultures. Her beautiful mother Claudine, born to a respected African-American middle class family, went to France against her parents’ wishes when she enlisted for service and was sent to do war duty with a mixed-race dance troupe. Bonnie was born of rape, her father an unknown assailant. After a few years of living in a car and relying on the generosity of friends, her alcoholic mother sends her to live with her own mother in New York.

This is a very sensory novel, the language marvelling in colour, smell, taste, and especially sound. The sounds of her mother’s beloved American jazz and blues, ‘a beautiful blend of Afro-Cuban strains,’ accompanies the commotion of her childhood. The music, the instruments, the singing, the sounds of dancing, are her sharpest memories: ´we came from sound.’

Bonnie came to be pregnant and awaiting childbirth with Mama Eva because her soulmate Mansour also ´came from sound. ´ A singer and musician whose ´sound’ melded African folk music, French sacred music, American, Cuban and Brazilian influences, his childhood was curiously similar to Bonnie’s. Born in difficult circumstances in a socially prominent Senegalese family, the circumstances of his birth also made his early years peripatetic. Neither knew the stability of home and parental love.

Bonnie and Mansour nearly meet a few times before meeting. She works as an assistant editor for a small record label in New York. He travels with his Irish-born best friend from Paris, where they grew up, to the United States, hoping to get a recording contract. She hears their demo and falls in love. When they finally meet, they feel they have always known each other. Mansour takes her to Mama Eva for safeguarding while he begins an important tour of Spain. Then he disappears and Bonnie refuses to believe that he has either abandoned her and their child or died, even when he has been gone without word for many months and his family is preparing for a funeral without a body.

Except in flashback, where their soul-closeness is evident, the two spend little time together in this book. Bonnie is confined to her upstairs room for the final stage of her complicated pregnancy, and spends much time alone, smelling Mama ´s wonderful African cooking, listening to the clatter around her, reflecting on her childhood and their short time together. Mansour is mostly away on tour, where he also goes over the bittersweet memories of his childhood in Senegal and Paris. Mama Eva likewise revisits her life. Their stories intersect in ways that seem mystical.

The novel has its own ´sound’ one that stays with the reader long after finishing it. It is more than the story of two young people who seem destined to meet, fall deeply for each other, and start their own family despite their own problematic upbringing. Like Mansour’s music, the story transcends those conventions. The narration by Julia Kwamya is solid, though I found it a bit flat on occasion, especially for a story that is so often soaring. The ending is a bit all-out ´Hollywood’ for my tastes, the building anxieties and suspicions resolved virtually overnight and very dramatically. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The novel, as noted, is very sensory and would translate well to the screen. I especially love how the author fulfils her objective to focus on our commonalities despite our far more visible differences. As Mansour expresses it, much as Bonnie had, ‘on the inside, everybody has a sound,’ unique but also harmonious.

Thank you, Dreamscape Select, for the advance audiobook copy.

The writing is good and the characters do stand out.

The story stands true with the blurb.

However, I will wait for the book to come out so that I can savour the second half.

I appreciate the audiobook but this book is one which I feel would be experienced reading better with a physical copy in a cosy environment.

I have been so excited to read this story since I saw the cover and read the synopsis and it did not disappoint! I love this story for the multigenerational trials that are held together by family over time. I love the combination of the love story throughout time that spread through generation. I got through this audiobook so fast because I was so entranced by the story over all. I could not put it down. It was so emotional and beautiful.

As the first book by this author it is a unique perspective on the changing tides of someone's life and how priorities move as you grow older. This book tells the story of two generations of families and is told from each of the main characters' perspectives. Set against the backdrops of multiple countries, we see the world through the eyes of people who are seeking their own dreams while reconciling with their pasts and the places they call home. The desire to succeed, the hard work, the obstacles faced, all beautifully laid out with gorgeous writing, tenderness, and deep emotion. A sprawling story of intercontinental travel, this is an intergenerational tale that should be produced on the big screen. This was a story on how other's not only affect our lives as they come into and leave it, but how we carry and pass on, whether familial, friendship, or romantic, those little grains of emotional experiences from one generation to another.