cover image Dream Palace

Dream Palace

Amanda Moores. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $20 (276pp) ISBN 978-0-7867-0125-4

A teenage crush that develops into an abusive marriage is the subject of Moores's promising but seriously flawed debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Laurie Longstreet meets the man of her dreams when she and her mom are rescued from an icy spinout near their central Indiana town by handsome, charming Jim Wellman, who's almost 10 years Laurie's senior. Six years later, Laurie meets Jim again at a college party; they wed after a whirlwind courtship. Jim, a deep-sea diver, spirits his young bride off to New Orleans, where she grows dismayed at his constant bar-hopping and semi-marginal existence. The sex-driven partnership rapidly frays, then tears as Jim's violent temper surfaces and Laurie finds herself trapped in a dangerous marriage. Moores works primarily through dialogue to tell her relatively absorbing story, and there are moments during its first half when the narrative seems about to take off. But the conspicuous dearth of interiority leaves Laurie a woefully incomplete character, and the ending, which involves a romantic rescue-by yet another dreamy, handsome man-is contrived and overwrought. (Sept.)