Dreaming Home

Praise for Dreaming Home

"Eminently accomplished, [and] often deliciously droll . . . The novel asks provocative questions: At what age are we wholly accountable for our actions? To what degree do we hold a traumatized person responsible for perpetuating harm?"
—Kia Corthron, New York Times

"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

"It takes a special book for me to detour from non-fiction . . . Dreaming Home is a reminder that intergenerational trauma and the coming out journey make for a challenging and uncomfortable path."
—Toronto Star

"A poignant and sensitively written story of the profound repercussions of a forced outage of a young boy by his sibling and the decades-long fallout that ensues for him, his family members, and his lovers. Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative is compelling and heartbreaking, with a gentle hint of humour."
—Judge's Citation, 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award

"From the opening sentence we know we’re in the hands of a master craftsman . . . Challenging and poignant, but ultimately joyful."
—Judge's Citation, 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award

"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

"Juggling six different points of view and forty years of cultural history would be an impressive feat for a seasoned novelist, but Lucian Childs managed to pull it off—with style, humour, and pathos—in his debut, the buzzed-about novel-in-linked-stories Dreaming Home."
—Open Book

"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

"Though weighty, the stories or chapters in Dreaming Home are easy to devour because they feel so real and personal . . . The language is sparse, yet beautifully written, illuminating brief moments and observations that root you to the lives and experiences of these characters, making them vivid and real."
—Will Fawley, Prairie Fire

"In elegant, emotionally resonant prose, Childs creates a nuanced and sensitive portrait of a life shaped by loss, abandonment, and generational trauma . . . Thematically sophisticated, Dreaming Home also explores persistent issues in the gay male community such as sexual racism and the disparagement of older men."
—Shawn Syms, Quill and Quire

"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