GIVE THEM UNQUIET DREAMS

A novel presents an emotional story about coming-of-age, spirituality, and the mysteries that lie beyond everyone’s ordinary, waking moments.

At the age of 14, Aiden Glencar’s life is already complicated. He and his older brother, Martin, move between their grandmother, a domineering and occasionally kleptomaniacal Irish Catholic, and their Aunt Clara, who does her best to look after the boys and her own children, taking them to a New Age, nondenominational church. Aiden’s confusion regarding these contradictory philosophies and the strangeness of his living situation is palpable and becomes even more engrossing and sympathetic when he reveals his budding gay sexuality and his fears of what his family and faith might say about it. But it’s Irish folklore more than Christian faith that inscribes the boys’ lives, as Aiden has the second sight, conferring with his dead grandfather and witnessing weirder and more frightening spirits throughout the Boston streets. The boys’ mother has been committed to an asylum, and Aiden fights to get her released even as the spirits urging him to do so give him some doubts about his own sanity. The story continues from this complex setup, teasing out details of Aiden and Martin’s boyhoods in a lovingly rendered 1970s Boston while advancing the murky tale of the spirits Aiden sees, the gift he shares with his mother, and the bitter tragedies and hard-earned triumphs they portend. Mulhern’s (Useless Things, 2018, etc.) prose is strong, delivering readers a sense of the child in Aiden’s voice and a thorough, descriptive view of the world around him. Not only that, but the writing is elevated by a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context. (At one point, Aiden muses: “Like Thoreau, I believe time is merely a stream we swim in. Someday the current of water will slip away, taking us with it, but the sandy bottom, eternity, will remain.”) Yet ultimately, it’s the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights, as Aiden’s uncertainty, Martin’s protectiveness, their grandmother’s determination, and their mother’s wistfulness and grief make this a story about family and history and give the sense that everything and everyone are connected across time, whether or not those ties are immediately perceived.

A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.