Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful Dreamers is another teen problem novel, this one with a contemporary Canadian setting. It is about growing up, and about coping with the added responsibilities this brings in the setting of the single parent family. Katie, the novel’s twelve-year-old heroine whose mother has died, lives with her father and her older brother and sister in suburban Vancouver. The family has a very democratic arrangement for sharing pocket money and making family decisions. In fact, Katie calls her father Max, which is confusing, for it is not clear for some pages what relation he is. Katie yearns to participate more fully in the family chores and family finances. She cannot help feeling that her contribution is so unimportant that no one would miss her if she left. Keeping up with older siblings is also difficult, for she tends to make a mess when she tries to help, as when her surprise chocolate cake fails and is the subject of family banter.

Katie’s contribution to the family finances comes from the paper run she shares with her friend, Gale, whose parents are separated. Both girls want to help their families by making more money; Gale wants to save enough money to visit her estranged father in Calgary. But money comes in slowly from the paper run, so that the girls work on schemes for making money quickly. They start a club for doing odd jobs for people, but, of course, discover that running an odd job business is not quite as easy as they thought. The girls are also lured by easier ways to make money, lotteries and shoplifting, although they quickly come to their senses. Katie’s troubles are increased because it seems that her father is going to remarry, and, to complicate matters, it is Gale’s mother that he seems to have his eye on. However, the story ends as children would have it end. The dead mother and separated father are not betrayed, for Katie’s beloved Max turns out to have been merely helping to effect the reconciliation between Gale’s parents which is the happy ending of the story. Twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls will probably enjoy the book, for the story is well told, although it tends to provide rather superficial explorations of the problems it tackles.