Dream State follows the lives of Cece, Charlie, and Garrett from their youth, when Cece marries and then quickly leaves Charlie for his best friend Garrett, to their old age. We see them as they reconcile after many years, as their children become friends, as they deal with aging, and as they navigate the impacts of climate change on the world around them.

What I loved:
This writing is so beautiful, especially the descriptions of Montana. The primary setting of Montana is at once beautiful and heartbreaking, given that the story goes into the future and addresses the impact of climate change.
The realistic look towards the future. I thought Puchner made the future vivid as his characters dealt with increasing fires in the western United States, new and complicated technology, and a rapidly changing culture.

What I didn’t love:
None of the characters are particularly likeable. They do inadvisable things, they have complicated relationships, and they all have times where they are actively disliked by each other. This is a personal preference - I personally need a character to root for, and I never really found one.
The flashbacks and time line jumps left some plot-points feeling more like plot-holes. Garrett’s guilt over the death of his college friend is never really resolved, and we understand that Cece and Charlie have a complicated relationship after they become friends again, but we never really understand how they feel about each other. I will say this does give the book a “dream” quality - did those things happen? Were they a false memory?

This isn’t a light read, but it is a challenging and meaty multi-generational story that will leave you thinking about the future.

Thanks to NetGalley, Doubleday Books, and Eric Puchner for this ARC!

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC of Dream Staet by Eric Puchner. This story takes place in Montana and really has an atmospheric quality to it, in fact, the backdrop of the story was one of the reasons I was drawn to request an ARC. This story opens with a couple, Cece and Charlie, who are at his parent’s home and are planning their wedding. Charlie’s friend Garrett is asked to officiate, which is a choice Cece is initially against, which kind of sets the tone of the story. Cece gets to know Garrett more and is drawn to him and realizes he is different than she first thought. The story progresses and in a turn of events Cece is seeing things and how the her future could be different than how she has imagined. The writing was well done and I look forward to more books from this author.

Dream State by Eric Puchner is a character-driven exploration of the lives of its three central figures and the significant others in their orbits. The story begins in Salish, Montana, where Cece is preparing for her wedding to Charlie at his childhood home. While Charlie works as a surgeon in Los Angeles, he asks his college best friend not only to officiate the upcoming wedding but also look after Cece in his absence—setting the stage for a narrative that will delve deep into the complexities of friendship, love, and loyalty.

Puchner zooms in on pivotal moments in the characters’ lives, examining the seemingly mundane events that make up their experiences with friendship, parenthood, and marriage. While the issues at play may seem ordinary, Puchner crafts complex and deeply flawed characters whose imperfections make them endearing. Though the book is lengthy and at times I found myself abruptly pulled away by the shifts in time and perspective, by the end, everything feels intricately unified. The pacing and style of the novel reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, with its careful dissection of human relationships under a magnifying glass. There’s a deeply satisfying resonance in the book’s conclusion.

The only downside for me was the novel's focus on natural disasters and the looming threat of climate change. While this is a popular theme in contemporary fiction, I find the persistent atmosphere of doom can occasionally overshadow the more intimate, character-driven moments. Overall, Dream State is a meaty and compelling read, perfect for those who appreciate introspective, character-driven fiction. Despite the heavy pessimism surrounding climate change, the novel offers a rewarding, thought-provoking experience.

Cece, Garrett, and Charlie are the three main characters of this multi-generational novel that explores how choices made early in life affect the rest of our lives. They live on the page and, despite an event that seems to drive a permanent wedge between them, they find they cannot live without the others in their lives. The author includes several current concerns as well: the harm humanity is doing to the earth/environment, the overwhelming role drugs are playing—especially in the lives of young adults, and the issues facing people as they age. An exceedingly insightful and well written book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC to read and review.

Dream State is an exquisitely crafted, multi-generational story that delves into the fragile intersections of love, loyalty, and the lingering consequences of past decisions. Set against the breathtaking yet increasingly imperiled landscape of Montana’s Salish lake country, Puchner delivers a tenderly intimate and powerfully expansive novel.

At its heart is Cece, a bride-to-be caught between two lives: the seemingly perfect future with her fiancé, Charlie, and the unexpected connection she forms with Garrett, Charlie’s troubled best friend. The tension between these three is palpable, their relationships layered with love, betrayal, and unspoken truths. Cece’s inner conflict is rendered with stunning emotional clarity, making her choices feel both inevitable and heartbreakingly human.

The narrative’s scope expands beyond that fateful summer, following the ripple effects of the characters’ decisions on their children decades later. This broader lens adds depth to the story, showing how personal histories shape and shadow future generations. Each perspective is distinct and compelling, creating a rich tapestry of voices and experiences that resonate long after the final page.

The novel is deeply attuned to its setting, with the warming Montana wilderness acting as both a vivid backdrop and a poignant metaphor for loss and resilience. The environmental themes are seamlessly woven into the story, enhancing its emotional impact without ever feeling didactic.

For readers who love sweeping, character-driven dramas with themes of love, regret, and redemption, Dream State is a triumph. It’s a novel that asks difficult questions and offers no easy answers, but its beauty lies precisely in this complexity. It's a deeply moving and unforgettable read.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dream State could have been more engaging. I found it budens the reader with verbose description and dictates the audience's sensory experience of the story. It took away from what was an interesting plot. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

This opus by Eric Puchner begins and ends at a wedding. This is NOT a spoiler as you know exactly how it ended at the start. It's a beautifully rendered tale of a marriage, the life of Cece and Garrett, and also the lives, peripherally, of Garrett's best friend Charlie. It starts with Charlie's wedding to Cece and how Garrett, the wedding officiant, ends up married to Cece instead.

This bare -bones description does not begin to describe the richness of the prose and the connections you form with the characters. They are all, even the next generation, three-dimensional living individuals. Garrett and Cece are unlikely soulmates. Garrett, a college drop-out, works for an environmental group that follows wolverines while it tracks them to their extinction in Wyoming, while Cece, also a drop-out, becomes an independent bookstore owner who blows her chance of success when hosting a famous author at a reading.

Charlie is an anesthesiologist who marries unsuccessfully, several times, and raises two children, also unsuccessfully. None of this describes the scope of this novel. Its glorious prose, its description of lakes, clouds, sunsets, storms, fires and of Salish, Montana over many years, of skiing runs and tragedy, parenthood and drug addiction, a changing environment, aging and illness. This complex novel travels many years into the future (yes, our future too) and ends as it began, back a t Cece's wedding. Finishing this novel, I sat breathed deeply, trying to return to my own reality.

Thank you to Net Galley and Doubleday for allowing me to read an early copy of this fine book.

Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC. I do not think I was the right audience for this book. I was hoping for more “dream-like” situation between the 3 main characters. I only liked some parts in the book.

"Dream State" is beautifully written and starts off strong. Yet, halfway through the book the narrative started to drag and it was difficult to engage with enough to push through to the end. Recommended for readers who love a great sentence, and/or don't mind books with many characters and narratives to follow. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: April 8, 2025.

#DreamState

Thank you to @NetGalley and @DoubleDay for an advanced copy of this book. I appreciate that they recognized that this book was something I would like based on another book I enjoyed. This book was very well written and I enjoyed reading it. However, it was very character heavy and going through the whole life of 6 people felt like a lot. I also didn't love how disjointed it was. Finding out someone got divorced or died was just like oh by the way. All the characters had major flaws, made bad decisions and I felt like I had no one to root for. The writing was very good but I just felt like the story was not that great.

interesting book about relationships and coming back and a marriage that didn't happen. Very interesting and really enjoyed learning more about the area and their jobs.

Dream State was an engaging, thought provoking novel that delves into the meaning of marriages, fate and consequences of decisions, and our climate crisis. Garrett, who marries his best friend’s almost wife, is the underdog- of the two friends he is the least likely, it would seem, to have the charmed life that he has. All this as he watches his friend’s life crumble after being invited back in his life. This is a u unique story and a really great read.
It did take me some time to really care about the characters and connect to them, but it is truly worth the wait. The story gets more interesting and the characters more complex with each page.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC.

In Eric Puncher’s “Dream State”, pivotal moments and moral choices cast a lengthy
shadow over the lives of Cece, Charlie, and Garrett.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained perplexities are largely unfolding on Salish Lake in Montana.

Salish, Montana, was one of those western towns caught in a strange moment of transition. It had begun as a Native American trading post, then had reinvented itself for many years as a logging center, and recently had reinvented itself once again as a thriving tourist destination for outdoor recreators.

Choices made are muddled under a pervading feeling of guilt that permeates and percolates a lifetime grasp of the past and an avenue to imagine possible futures.

Arousing tantalizing storytelling that slows down our minds while dismantling our hearts engages us from the start.
The wonderful-gripping beginning is strong!!!

College roommate, best-bud, Garrett, officiating the wedding has fallen in love with Charlie’s fiancé, Cece.
Uh-oh!
Charlie wanted to tell Garrett that he loved him like a brother, but it felt too funny for him to really say.
“Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel. It was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang, the rhythm itself said the important things, the non-jokey things, so you wouldn’t have to”.

Cece met Charlie when he was a surgical resident at John Hopkins-second year.
Cece was in medical school too. She ended up, dropping out her second semester, but they bonded over missing Los Angeles where they were both from.

Cece and Charlie were getting married in Charlie’s old family house in Montana. Friends were to flying in from the East Coast and West Coast.

A small quibble….
There were a few extraneous characters …. with other disparate threads to weave.
I was less interested in scenes when Cece, Charlie, or Garrett left a page or two …but it’s a ‘small’ quibble…
It was the intimate stories we learn from and about Cece, Charlie, and Garett… that made me love this novel most.
I was even left thinking about the ways people try to do good by their lives … yet come up against their own lascivious hunger.

I enjoyed this contemporary story. Despite a few dips of lost intensity….
the three main characters and themes alone held my interest.
Be it change, impermanence,
adversity, unconscious desires, surreal sensory experiences, love, loss, betrayal, grief, jealousy, illness, death, the effects of natural disasters, and the beauty of Montana itself, (the glaciers and sparkling lakes especially), were compelling.
The core essence of this story
speaks to the human conditions we call life.

4.5 rating!

I really loved the first part of this, which felt exactly like the title - a dream state. Allowing two characters to fall in love over the course of a month in 2004, while injecting key points of their histories (as well as the history of the man they're both betraying)) was done so beautifully here. Montana is as much of a character as any of the humans, and the state and these people really shine through exceptional prose.

For me, the book started to lose it's steam a bit after that. The next sections skip forward in time, to the first reunion of our trio (when their respective children are 7), and then another 15 years later, when the trio plus some college friends meet for a reunion after a medical crisis. These sections, for me, were a little thin. I think that's perhaps part of the middle aged part of life - when you're just trying to keep the balls in the air, and not able to really stop and take the time to ruminate on any deeper feelings. Meanwhile, we've now sped past our current present, and as in many near-future books, the planet is deep in crisis.

We move then even farther into the future, when Cece is diagnosed with dementia. Our planet, at this point, is damaged beyond repair. I was surprised by how much I liked this section (like may not even be the right word for it). There's a kinship between Cece's slide into her illness, and the fate of planet Earth, that feels almost concomitant. Garrett as the unexpected long-lasting hero feels right, even in how wrong he finds it, and the way their marriage morphs from a crush, to a flawed and sometimes broken one, all the way back to the newlywed honeymoon phase is actually quite remarkable.

On the whole, this is a really fantastic book, one that I'm glad to have had the opportunity to read. There's a lot of substance here, but that never gets in the way of some gorgeous prose, and I appreciate a book that can dress its message up as fantastic narrative. 4 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A crazy tale of love, of redemption and betrayal.

When the story opens, Cece is in love. She has arrived incredibly early to plan her dream Montana wedding to her doctor fiance Charlie. Charlie asks his old best friend to look out for her and before you know it... CeCe calls off the wedding.

Years later, the group reconvenes in Montana. Has Charlie actually forgave his ex best friend and ex fiance?
Puchner hurtles us forward in irregular groupings of years. By the end of this story you will know the three protagonists as well as your own family members. It's a true work of Americana, and art, and I hope that everyone reads it!
#doubleday #dreamstate #ericpuchner

The more I read this novel, the more I enjoyed "Dream State." This novel follows two close male college friends and the woman who they both love through generations. Years later, after the love betrayal (trying to avoid spoilers), the friends reunite in Montana, and renew their friendships, their children, and more or less watch each other age as their grown children go their directions, one of the three more or less disappears from the novel, while one spirals tragically out of control and the other becomes successful making films. Throughout the novel, we also see the impact of climate change through their skiing, swimming in the lake, and endless wildfires. It's a novel filled with love. and grief.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the Kindle ARC in exchange for an honest review. The first half of Dream State was great and very promising. Cece and Charlie are in love - college-aged, Charlie on the path to becoming a doctor and Cece a medical school drop out, trying to carve her niche in life. The week of the wedding, Cece meets Garrett - Charlie's best friend from college. She marries Charlie but when he leaves for L.A. and she is left at his family's home, ill after the wedding, she decides Garrett is the one for her. Charlie remarries, has children but he and Cece obviously never stopped loving each other. The story follows them through their lives, their children's adulthoods but somehow about halfway through the book, the story lost its momentum and it was difficult for me to finish the book.

First thanks to NetGalley for the early release. What a book! Started this book on an airplane and couldn’t wait to get home to continue the story, which follows three main characters. The storytelling was so engaging you never knew what lies ahead, and a perfect page turner. (I hate books where within the first chapter you know how the story will end.) The writing style was perfect, engaging, as each character’s life unfolded based on their choices. Expect many twists and turns in Montana. Loved every page of this story and each word moved the story along. Bravo to Eric Puchner as a storyteller, for writing the perfect story, with vivid characters. Highly recommend this book!

I received this book as an early release through Netgalley in exchange for a review.

Puchner has crafted 3 engaging main characters in Cece, Garrett and Charlie and the initial conflict of 3-way, star-crossed lovers lifted the energy of the early chapters as flashbacks developed the backstory and conflicts that rendered these three-dimensional. However, about halfway through the novel and once most of the backstory is revealed, nothing much happens. They main characters get older. They have children who have problems. They get older. The author attempts to flesh out the same, tired love triangle of the initial conflict, but by this time the reader doesn't care anymore. Then suddenly, there's more attention paid to the Montana setting and the future-world becomes dystopian as climate change impacts the characters' health and surroundings. None of this was foreshadowed in the early chapters.
I'm not sure what this novel was attempting. At first it seemed how early tragedy shapes our choices as adults and then we live with the impacts forever. But then the climate change focus in later chapters gave me pause as to what, exactly, the author was attempting. I would not recommend.

Dream state describes perfectly my experience reading this book. Once I started it, I never really put it down.

Dream State by Eric Puchner starts in the not-so-distance past, whizzes by a recognizable present -- wild fires, cell phones, COVID-19 -- before flinging us into an unrecognizable, but unsurprising future -- daily AQI monitoring, coral boneyards, vegetable shortages, the frantic beeping of the last living wolverine. The story is co-narrated mainly by a trio, Cece, Charlie, and Garrett from young adulthood to senescence, and features the many supporting characters that come into and out of their life. Two best friends and the woman they both love. The characters endure moments of intense frustration and break each others' hearts, and yet through the years they are so full of love for one another. Dream State is a love letter to Montana, to parenthood, but most of all to the testament of friendship.

If this review reads all over the place it's because I'm having a difficult time summarizing my thoughts on this book. Finishing this felt like waking up from a trance or like I had had the opportunity to look into a crystal ball. It made me hug my husband and my dog. I saw the abundance in the produce section of the grocery store with fresh eyes. I took a giant deep breath outside. Having read Puchner's realistic portrait of the future, I felt gratitude for the present. Further, it checked all the boxes for me, personally, for being an entirely captivating book. The characters were flawed. They endure morally grey situations and make good (and sometimes bad) decisions. There are moments of such intense humanity in the book in the that I had to put it down. If you're still reading this mess you should STOP and read this book! In particular, I think fans multigenerational novels and of Maggie O'Farrell, Charlotte McConaghy (especially Migration), and Anthony Doerr will really enjoy the ride.

Thank you to Doublesday Books and NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.