Dream Boy

Dream Boy

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3.94 of 5 stars 3.94  ·  rating details  ·  1,812 ratings  ·  171 reviews
ALA Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual Book Award.

DREAM BOY confirms the immense promise of Jim Grimsley's award-winning debut, WINTER BIRDS. In his electrifying novel, adolescent gay love, violence, and the spirituality of old-time religion are combined through the alchemy of Grimsley's vision into a powerfully suspenseful story of escape and redemption.

"I've never read a novel remot

...more
Paperback, 208 pages
Published January 30th 1997 by Touchstone (first published 1995)
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Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)
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Irissska
Jan 20, 2013 Irissska rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who is ok with no "Happily Ever After "
Shelves: m-m, worth-reading
I am still under impression of this book. Since the moment I read the last page I have thought about it all the time. You will find a lot of reviews on this book here, both negative and positive. And I agree with both. As for me, I liked this book. Really liked. And you shouldn't believe reviewers that the book is worth of reading or it isn't. Just read it yourself and decide.

(view spoiler)[ The only thing in this book that left me uncertain if I liked this part or if I didn't is the ending. I k...more
Bonnie Brody
Feb 28, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommended to Bonnie by: Heard Interview on NPR
Dream Boy is a tender love story that is also sensual and violent. It is the story of two high school boys who fall in love. Roy and Nathan are neighbors and the attraction is immediate and profound. They are secretive and tentative about their relationship but it is intense and astonishing in its power.

Roy and Nathan attend the same high school where Roy is a senior and Nathan is a sophomore. Nathan has just moved to the area. His family moves often because his father can't keep a job and drink...more
Nancy
Wow, I don't know what to make of this. I heard about it on NPR; the commentator, a gay man, said he wished he had had this book when he was a teenager, because it would have told him he was not alone. That seemed a good reason to read it.

Dream Boy follows Nathan, a bright, delicate 15-year-old-boy, as he falls into a dreamlike courtship with Roy, an older, popular boy at Nathan's new school. Though the sex never feels prurient, the novel is unrelentingly sexual. I started to wonder if there was...more
Clare
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Jennifer
Just finished it and am trying to determine what I think. As an atheist bordering the agnostic I am not one for Bible-reading and hymn-singing and so forth. So I cannot read the ending in a religious context. But what remains then? If I say it is about love between Nathan and Roy, then I get the ending (even though it can be seen as over the top, too faitytale-ish or whatever). I get it nonetheless.

I am highly disturbed by the whole plot because the writing gets to you. It seems to be clinical,...more
Vmcla
Dream Boy is a good beginnng for a novel. It's a decent outline. But aside from an intriguing writing style, this book fails if only because there is no ending.

Actually, I felt extremely cheated and angry that the author would do such a thing. First he manipulates us ruthlessly and plays on our emotions and for what? To give us a book with no ending? Either suggested ending is an unbelieveably trite.

The author should be ashamed of himself. Worn out plot, brutal enough to make reading difficul...more
Jacob 3
This book is one that hit home for me. The mains character's name is Nathan, and he is one of the strongest, most inspirational, yet still seemingly real, main characters I have ever had the pleasure of reading about. In this story Nathan is growing to learn what it means to be Gay, and trying to get over his tragic past...which lives with him- in his father. Although not an uplifting book I love it for it's realistic nature.

In the end of the book Nathan and the boy of his dreams, Roy ( the savi...more
Kaiya
While the writing was great, the book left me with alot of questions. As an athiest and not having much knowledge of the bible or religion, the ending of this book was confusing as I cannot read the ending in a religious context. But then Im left with an ending so confusing and "unrealistic"
The writing stays with you after you finish the book .. I kept thinking about the book and the events that happened in the book for the rest of the day. Its a great love story between Nathan and Roy, althoug...more
Ariel Uppstrom
This was assigned as one of my Gay Book Club books. It was interesting to read an older LGBT novel, but it lacked some pizazz that I think I'm accustom to in current LGBT lit. I enjoyed the main character, but the boy he was in love with seemed so moody and artificial that I got fed up with him right away and felt that the main character should just move on. However, young love and new love is always hard to be rational with in, so I can understand his attachment.

I found the abuse the main chara...more
Matthew
Dream Boy is one of those books that really makes me wonder why so many people love a sad story. No, 'sad story' isn't even the right words, because I enjoy a good drama, where certain things go wrong, but they always get better. Or perhaps they don't get better, but you know that things will be okay anyway, that life will go on, that there will be survival. Dream Boy is not one of those stories. Dream Boy is Shakespearean in its tragedy, one of those stories that you finish and don't even know...more
Rachel Eliason
A friend described this book as a long poem, which captures the feel and style of it very well.

Dream boy tells the story of two young boys who fall in love. It's set in the south and the two are very much in the closet. Roy says frequently, "you can't tell anyone about this." and Nathan replies, "I won't." The romance between the boys is well developed and very believable and accessible. Even if you are not gay and don't read gay romances, this is a well written story that anyone can enjoy.

Nath...more
K.Z. Snow
Brutally entrancing. I anticipated this being a wholebunchofstars read. The ending, however, left me troubled and unsatisfied (rather like In the Lake of the Woods). I do so wish that writers of "literary" fiction would get over their self-indulgent love of ambiguity, and I suspect the vast majority of readers feel the same. What's the point of it? Seriously.

I had no clue what I was left with when this story drew to a close. It seemed as if that elaborately, subtly constructed castle of prose a...more
Alex
Stars: 2.5/5

Overall:
While this is a beautifully written story with several positive points, the ending really sours the entire story for me.

What I liked
Writing. The style is unique and moving, feeling abstract and distant in many cases, which works to illustrate how the main character has become closed off (although the writing style doesn't change as he opens up.

Abuse. The main character's relationship with his father is handled well. The fear is palpable without showing any actual abuse being...more
Michelle Will
Wow! What an amazing story. I have only read one other gay love story (which was incomparable) and I had no idea what to expect. As a heterosexual female I did not know if I could relate to this story or what my reaction would be. In real life you believe that you pass no judgement and you think you are open-minded, and this book solidified these ideals for me. This was possibly one of the best love stories I have ever read. The writing is so eloquent that many things can be unsaid yet still fel...more
Matt
This is a story about two high school boys (one is 16 and the other is 18). Nathan (the 16 year old) has just moved to town with his family and we gradually learn something really, really bad is happening at home to Nathan. His father is a religious zealot but is also a drunk. Nathan is realizing he is gay but has absolutely no one to talk to about it, until he meets his next door neighbor, Roy, the 18 year old. They are attracted to each other but Roy is having a harder time understanding and a...more
Edina Rose
Two teenage boys fall in love in old rural conservative America (well, "old"..., not sure it's much different now from what I hear).
The "falling in love" part is very well done: the little looks, the shortness of breath, the redness of cheeks and neck and the first touches. There are sex scenes, but they are not gratuitous and not very explicit anyway. There is a rape scene though that made me want to throw up, so be warned.

The climax felt rushed to me but the beauty of the prose makes up for t...more
ilike merey
Oh, this book has ten thousand reviews. (Not quite, but more or less).
Still, I will add one more.
A tiny one.
I read this book as if it had been a horror, with my fingers in front of my eyes
for most of the second part of the novel. I felt as if I knew what would happen, the outline of
what would happen, from the first pages, and that's what made it hard to go along, but I had to.
The prose was beautiful, sparse, not one word was wasted.
The characters were simple, but deep--I knew them. I understoo...more
Andrew

This is the first time in a long time that I've had to actually stop a book before I've finished, so I'm not even sure why I'm putting this review up here, but mostly to clear up some things that I feel are important. I tried very hard to just keep charging through the book until it was done, but this book was just that bad. I don't understand how this won an award at all.


First of all, everything about this novel is repetitive and boring. After the first time they meet, Nathan and Roy basically

...more
Sarah B.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Russel
This book was poorly written. It is like a 10 year old wrote it; there were no fluidity in the words and everything was so vague. Nathan is like a retard, he didn't act assertive enough and Roy was a user. I don't understand why Burke had to rape Nathan, it was obvious that with a little seduction he could have him anyway. The whole story was such a mess. It was a total waste of time reading it.

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Miranda Diaz
A poetically written story of two high school boys discovering their homosexuality and struggling through challenges of peer pressure, high school, religion, and abuse. The story is stunningly and tenderly written and is elegantly descriptive. I really loved Jim's poingant style of writing.

I'm giving this a 3 because the ending was lost on me and wasn't completely clear. While the haunted house seemed symbolic for everything haunting the 2 main characters, it was odd. Far too much emphasis on t...more
Kate O'Hanlon
Whether you like this book or not will largely depend on how much of a let down you find the ending to be. Rather makes the book difficult to review.
Up until the last 1/5th or so this is a great book, sometimes sweet, sometimes very dark and always humming with suppressed menace. This is one of those books that, from the first page, hints that something terrible might happen and thereby keeps you on the edge of your seat worried sick about the two main characters Roy and Nathan. The problem is t...more
Brian
When i first read this, I was in college and it was one of my first gay-themed books. As a closeted teen myself, it was easy to relate to the difficulties of growing up in a small-ass town, having to hide who you were.

I remember feeling how great it would feel to be able to just run away and leave it all behind.

But now... 10 years later... I watched the movie. And I gotta say... I sure hope authors are writing uplifting stories about gay youth these days. Like where the main character breaks ou...more
George
Jim Grimsley is one of my favorite authors. I haven't read this book in years, but decided that I wanted to revisit an old friend, so I pulled this off the shelf. And what a book this is. It is a coming out story, a story of first love, one of violence, rape and incest. And it is so well written and compelling and horrifying (all at the same time) that I could not put it down. And the ending is so ambiguous that the reader is left to come up with their own conclusion of what happened. Simply gor...more
Gloria
Sep 20, 2007 Gloria rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: People who aren't homophobic.
This is my favourite book. I can relate to almost every aspect of the story. Jim Grimsley is a genius.
Brianna
Jul 26, 2009 Brianna rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: friends
A haunting story made a bit uncomfortable by the inclusion of sexual abuse. But I feel like the author succeeded in making an impact, choosing the words and triggers to induce the reactions he wanted in the reader.

The story deals with, among other things: first loves, homosexuality in a small town, and sexual abuse.

The boys' relationship is typical of teenagers: hot and cold, subject to the influence of their peers. It feels real.

The conclusion is a bit of a surprise, taking a somewhat obvious a...more
Jamie
Dec 10, 2012 Jamie rated it 2 of 5 stars
Recommended to Jamie by: NPR
I have been mulling over my review for this book since I finished it. It seems that people either love this book more than anything or hate it with every fiber of their being. There's not much middle ground. I want to love this book but at the same time I hate it. I actually wanted to give it 2.5 stars but that's not allowed here. If you want, you can read what this book is all about pretty much anywhere. I won't clutter this review with that or any spoilers. I can't love this book and I don't k...more
Penny Wilder
This book was extremely well done, but given the content, reading it was just devastating. It broke my heart. All I can say is, if you know anyone who is being abused in any way, doing nothing is NOT okay. Report it. I don't want to give away the story, but it made me so angry. If you know your (or any) child is being abused, or was abused, you get them (and yourself if applicable) out of that situation, and away from the person who abused them REGARDLESS of who that person is. If you can, you s...more
Chris
Wow. I don't know what to say. It was a fascinating book. So heartfelt and and in a way haunting. It was hopeful, fun, dark, and just plain sad all at once. The ending was so charged with emotion that I actually had to go back and retread it and I'm still not sure what happened. I always tell my students that good authors leave you wanting more. This book definitely does that. I'm not sure what happened to Roy and Nathan in the end. I know what I hope happened, but I'm left with an uneasy feelin...more
Carol
The line-by-line writing in Dream Boy is lovely. The story unfolds slowly as we watch Nathan's love for Roy develop. But slowness, and the sadness we feel for Nathan, who sleeps outside for fear of his father who sexually abuses him, makes for a sobering, and at times wearisome, read. A scene near the end at an abandoned house needs editing--it goes on for about 30 pages before anything significant happens. The violence at the end of that scene is necessary and tragic. Dream Boy was published in...more
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Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist. Jim's first novel, Winter Birds, was published by Algonquin Books in 1994. The novel won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Jim's second novel, Dream Boy, won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature (the Stonewa...more
More about Jim Grimsley...
Comfort & Joy Winter Birds Kirith Kirin My Drowning Boulevard

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