I know so many of you LOVE a family drama! I mean don’t we all. I love drama full stop! So when I heard about this debut novel - Dream State by Eric Puchner - I was excited to try it because it seemed like a book that would scratch that particular itch in my summer reading.

And it was really good guys! It felt very much in the vein of someone like Claire Lombardo, but perhaps with higher stakes in some instances.

To set the scene, the book is set in Montana, a state I don’t know much about aside from its national parks and frontier legacy - but it’s a setting that’s clearly important here, and I enjoyed how alive the place felt.

It starts with our three protagonists: Cece is marrying Charlie, who’s parents own a lake house in the fictional town of Salish. Charlie has asked Garrett, his close friend from college, to officiate the wedding. When Cece meets him, she’s unimpressed. But the wedding is derailed in a way that has consequences for years to come. We travel back and forth in time, getting to know not just these original characters but also their children and friends over the course of some 50 years.

I raced through the first half of this one, and really enjoyed it. The outcomes of decisions that got made were SO interesting to me, and although the first section takes place over a short period of time, the rest then flips across time barriers so quickly that I didn’t feel bored.

BUT I will say, my investment mostly stayed with these original characters. Any book that has multiple narrative strands takes a risk - you end up with favourites. I have to admit I was less interested in the bits later in the book that dealt with the drama of the kids as they grew up and made their own life choices. I DID really appreciate the idea that everything reverberates down through generations in unforeseen ways, no matter how much you don’t want it to. But the kids felt less complex and maybe even a little cliche.

Later in the book, climate change becomes a bigger theme, with its own set of repercussions. I’m still mulling over whether this worked for me or not - objectively I think it’s a really important topic but in the book it felt suddenly enormous, the balance off-kilter compared to the first two thirds.

At its heart those original, central three relationships kept did keep me invested though! Love and friendship, marriage and parenthood - these felt realistically explored as being sometimes good and sometimes bad and sometimes surprising and sometimes boring. That’s life. And I keenly wanted to know where these guys were going to end up, through it all.

Huge thanks to netgalley and Hachette for my copy!