DREAM STATE is set to be the lengthy saga of winter. At its heart are the complex dynamics of three friends and a deep betrayal, unfolding over decades. A cherished familyMontana lake house serves as an anchor for the charactachers throughout their lives. Puchner masterfully captures pivotal moments in the characters’ lives through vivid vignettes, exploring the intricacies of friendship, parenthood, and marriage. DREAM STATE is a compelling, multigenerational story that beautifully examines how small decisions shape the course of a life.

READ THIS IF YOU:
-love to get lost in a lengthy character-driven novel
-appreciate a literary writing style and a well-crafted sentence
-enjoy unique shifts in points of view

Many thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for an electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review.

RATING: 4/5
PUB DATE: February 18, 2025

I picked this book up because it’s set in Montana, a state I grew up in. I finished this book because of the pace, writing style, and unique change of POV.

The sense of place in this novel is strong and the author does an incredible job of detailing the nuances of the people and setting of Montana. More than once I laughed or rolled my eyes at an explanation of the type of people CeCe encountered.

This book is quiet and heartbreaking but also weaves a beautiful tale of what it’s really like to live a life and be human. To be happy and yet unfulfilled. To love deeply and hurt incredibly. I loved it.

Thank you to Doubleday for sending me an ARC of this book so I can bring you this early review! Opinions all my own.

Overview: Cece finds herself as the point of a love triangle on her wedding day. Having gone to Montana a month early, without her fiancé, to plan the wedding, she finds herself falling into an enemies to lover's romance with her fiancé's best friend. The book starts right before the wedding in 2004 and charts Garrett, Charlie, and CeCe's lives and unlikely friendship through to their deaths in old age from finding careers to raising kids to growing old and watching the planet deteriorate around them. Overall: 4

Characters: 4 The dynamics here are interesting, but there's a certain lack of depth to these characters where they struggle to move beyond being archetypes with little quirks. Their relationships, overall, are what drive the book, but they could have been mined further. Garrett is the most interesting character. He starts the book still on shaky footing from a rough mental health bout that left him hospitalized in San Fransisco. Over the course of the book, he manages to find his calling, pursuing his passion for the outdoors, and realizing that he loved parts of life he couldn't imagine actually enjoying. Cece is from LA and approaches life in Montana like a quintessential city person. She loves to romanticize the quaint town and abundant nature until she throws a big fit about the place's "lack of culture' among other things. Cece is a tough character to sympathize with because she's often her own agent of chaos and the driver of her own unhappiness where her in the moment impulses tend to conflict with her more shallow wants. Then Charlie is accomplished in his field as a doctor and tries incredibly hard to embody the optimism he knows he should feel. Part of the interest in Charlie's character development is watching the mask slip, revealing that this disposition was somewhat of an act all along.

The minor characters vary in their development. The group of college friends is interesting to track through the years, and they have a surprising amount of development. Charlie, Garrett, and Cece's kids become entwined in each other's lives and the oldest kids become a central focus of the book, but they struggle with the same developmental problems as the main characters. Also, all of the children at the point where they're children all sound very similar and, to me, even as someone who grew up in the vein of precocious kids that Puchner is clearly trying to convey here, didn't feel realistically like eight or eleven or sixteen year olds. The fact that their voices and personalities hardly changed through these major age jumps further drove this point home. Being just slightly older than these characters (based on the timeline of when the wedding was), they also used references and words that didn't feel at all fitting of my generation. It felt like all of the characters were very much being drawn from the same well regardless of age or gender or background.

I will say, even though Lana, Garrett and Cece's daughter, seems a bit contrived, I really did come to love her character. Maybe it's because I saw myself most in her, but I did find myself enjoying the book more when she was in the scene. I also felt like she had by far the best character development over the arc of the book as we saw her go from a somewhat bratty kid to an ambitious young adult to a middle aged person with the capacity to view the world beyond herself. Puchner managed to show a softening in her character that didn't compromise her essential personality, which I want to give fair props for.

Plot: 3 This book could've comfortably been half its length and perhaps made its point in a clearer fashion. I love the idea of taking the reader through not just the big dramatic runaway bride moment but watching the repercussions of that play out over years and years. Rarely do we follow characters through the full arcs of their lives. We get to see the moments of satisfaction and regret that come from it as well as an unlikely healing of a friendship. I think the biggest problem with the book is that Puchner wants to follow everyone, everywhere all at once. There are too many threads, we're intimately following too many people as the scope expands to include adult children. The chapters stray in too many directions without connection to a central thread. In going so wide, the substance feels diluted. Also, the chapters are long and often overwrought with detail, which majorly impacts the pacing. It felt like, especially towards the end of the book, Puchner developed a fear of boring the audience and threw everything but the kitchen sink at adding to the plot from a rescue at a cult to one of the characters becoming a movie star to long passages trying to illustrate Alzheimers on the page. I honestly wish that less time had been devoted to forward motion than backfilling the characters' relationship before the wedding. Those few chapters were the most compelling.

Writing: 4 You're probably wondering by now why I gave the book a 4 when I've done a fair amount of complaining. A lot of it is the setting. I grew up in Wyoming, in a resort town a bit further along than the one in Montana described here, but a gateway to a National Park nonetheless. I don't know if I've ever seen that kind of setting or the intimate knowledge of nature you gain from growing up in a place like that reflected in a novel. While there was too much detail overall in my opinion, the bits about hiking, skiing, backcountry work, and even wolverines hit close to home and felt like a warm hug. I also went to college in LA, the other setting of the novel, so this felt like a fun fusion of worlds. And Puchner generally does well with writing setting.

I didn't love the prose style overall. There were some sentence level crutches throughout that just personally bugged me, and while the book is sprawling, it largely felt surface level, which was frustrating. Books that I love burrow in deep, and I never found that here. I think this is largely a matter of preference, and there's a lot of good to find in this book. Also, the book projects into the near future to cover the entire scope of the lives of people who would, at present, be approximately in parents' age—somewhere in their late forties or early fifties. Puchner uses much of this future-casting to focus on climate change and the impending climate disasters that are getting more real by the day. This is natural considering his choice of settings, but it all just hit too close to home. He describes a perpetually burning LA, landmarks destroyed, which stoked my anxiety given that LA dealing with unprecedented and unconfined wild fires as I write this. Also, smaller details like summer in Montana becoming nearly unlivable from constant wildfire smoke both local and blown in. The truly erratic temperatures. Skiing being nearly gone. As someone who cares deeply about climate change, watches in horror as the effects start to visibly take hold every day, this book just stoked my anxiety and made me feel even more hopeless about my future, everyone else's, and that of a place I truly love. As someone who did not need a wake-up call, the end of the book just made me sick to my stomach because Puchner is right, all of this will happen given the current trajectory of our leadership. That makes me incredibly sad, and that's not his fault for being a realist, for writing a novel that casts out to that place. If this could make someone understand the future we're heading towards, effect even small change in someone, then that's imagine. But I say that as a warning if you're in a delicate place regarding the state of the world right now. Be gentle with yourself.

Review to be posted on the blog in February closer to release date.

If you like books that span the characters whole lifetime, this is the book for you! It features Cece, Charlie and Garrett from wedding through their golden years and focuses on the relationships between couples, families and with each other as friends.

For me, I almost didn’t finish this book. To me the writing was tedious. I’m not exactly sure why but it felt slow for me and took me awhile to get through.

I also felt like this book had a lot of things going on!

Thank you to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book.

A beautifully written story that follows the lives of three people who have been friends since their early years, Charlie, Cece and Garrett. There is a wedding fairly early on, but Cece’s marriage to Charlie falls apart relatively soon after, and Cece marries Garrett.

As the years pass and their lives change, and as the culture changes, the focus in this story includes climate change, how aging is affecting them, after they have managed to put the past behind them, they once again resume contact. As the years pass, even their children become friends.

There were moments in this which were heartbreaking, but also felt timely as I thought about the increase in fires that we have been seeing over the years.


Pub Date: 18 Feb 2025

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Doubleday Books / Doubleday

Thank you @doubledaybooks and @netgalley for this advance e-galley of:

Dream State by Eric Puchner
Pub date: February 18, 2025

This beautiful story begins as young love, spans over fifty years and fills us with regret, hope, longing and life choices. It reminded me that people often come into our lives to save us - often from ourselves. Have you ever considered your road not taken? What would have happened if you chose a different path, a different circumstance? This story is not fantasy or romance, it is the reality of choices we have made and the outcome of those choices. It's sensitive and reflective. First read from this author and will not be my last.

Thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for the ebook. A wedding is about to take place in Montana, by a lake, in 2004. Cece, a former medical student, is going to marry Charlie, a doctor, and get married by Charlie’s friend from college, Garrett. From this tiny triangle, we follow the lives of these three, their families and even an ever warming Montana for the next fifty years. It becomes an epic relationship journey that grows stronger with each passing chapter.

Dream State follows the lives of Cece, Charlie, and Garrett from their youth, when Cece marries and then quickly leaves Charlie for his best friend Garrett, to their old age. We see them as they reconcile after many years, as their children become friends, as they deal with aging, and as they navigate the impacts of climate change on the world around them.

What I loved:
This writing is so beautiful, especially the descriptions of Montana. The primary setting of Montana is at once beautiful and heartbreaking, given that the story goes into the future and addresses the impact of climate change.
The realistic look towards the future. I thought Puchner made the future vivid as his characters dealt with increasing fires in the western United States, new and complicated technology, and a rapidly changing culture.

What I didn’t love:
None of the characters are particularly likeable. They do inadvisable things, they have complicated relationships, and they all have times where they are actively disliked by each other. This is a personal preference - I personally need a character to root for, and I never really found one.
The flashbacks and time line jumps left some plot-points feeling more like plot-holes. Garrett’s guilt over the death of his college friend is never really resolved, and we understand that Cece and Charlie have a complicated relationship after they become friends again, but we never really understand how they feel about each other. I will say this does give the book a “dream” quality - did those things happen? Were they a false memory?

This isn’t a light read, but it is a challenging and meaty multi-generational story that will leave you thinking about the future.

Thanks to NetGalley, Doubleday Books, and Eric Puchner for this ARC!

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC of Dream Staet by Eric Puchner. This story takes place in Montana and really has an atmospheric quality to it, in fact, the backdrop of the story was one of the reasons I was drawn to request an ARC. This story opens with a couple, Cece and Charlie, who are at his parent’s home and are planning their wedding. Charlie’s friend Garrett is asked to officiate, which is a choice Cece is initially against, which kind of sets the tone of the story. Cece gets to know Garrett more and is drawn to him and realizes he is different than she first thought. The story progresses and in a turn of events Cece is seeing things and how the her future could be different than how she has imagined. The writing was well done and I look forward to more books from this author.

Dream State by Eric Puchner is a character-driven exploration of the lives of its three central figures and the significant others in their orbits. The story begins in Salish, Montana, where Cece is preparing for her wedding to Charlie at his childhood home. While Charlie works as a surgeon in Los Angeles, he asks his college best friend not only to officiate the upcoming wedding but also look after Cece in his absence—setting the stage for a narrative that will delve deep into the complexities of friendship, love, and loyalty.

Puchner zooms in on pivotal moments in the characters’ lives, examining the seemingly mundane events that make up their experiences with friendship, parenthood, and marriage. While the issues at play may seem ordinary, Puchner crafts complex and deeply flawed characters whose imperfections make them endearing. Though the book is lengthy and at times I found myself abruptly pulled away by the shifts in time and perspective, by the end, everything feels intricately unified. The pacing and style of the novel reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, with its careful dissection of human relationships under a magnifying glass. There’s a deeply satisfying resonance in the book’s conclusion.

The only downside for me was the novel's focus on natural disasters and the looming threat of climate change. While this is a popular theme in contemporary fiction, I find the persistent atmosphere of doom can occasionally overshadow the more intimate, character-driven moments. Overall, Dream State is a meaty and compelling read, perfect for those who appreciate introspective, character-driven fiction. Despite the heavy pessimism surrounding climate change, the novel offers a rewarding, thought-provoking experience.

Cece, Garrett, and Charlie are the three main characters of this multi-generational novel that explores how choices made early in life affect the rest of our lives. They live on the page and, despite an event that seems to drive a permanent wedge between them, they find they cannot live without the others in their lives. The author includes several current concerns as well: the harm humanity is doing to the earth/environment, the overwhelming role drugs are playing—especially in the lives of young adults, and the issues facing people as they age. An exceedingly insightful and well written book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC to read and review.

Dream State is an exquisitely crafted, multi-generational story that delves into the fragile intersections of love, loyalty, and the lingering consequences of past decisions. Set against the breathtaking yet increasingly imperiled landscape of Montana’s Salish lake country, Puchner delivers a tenderly intimate and powerfully expansive novel.

At its heart is Cece, a bride-to-be caught between two lives: the seemingly perfect future with her fiancé, Charlie, and the unexpected connection she forms with Garrett, Charlie’s troubled best friend. The tension between these three is palpable, their relationships layered with love, betrayal, and unspoken truths. Cece’s inner conflict is rendered with stunning emotional clarity, making her choices feel both inevitable and heartbreakingly human.

The narrative’s scope expands beyond that fateful summer, following the ripple effects of the characters’ decisions on their children decades later. This broader lens adds depth to the story, showing how personal histories shape and shadow future generations. Each perspective is distinct and compelling, creating a rich tapestry of voices and experiences that resonate long after the final page.

The novel is deeply attuned to its setting, with the warming Montana wilderness acting as both a vivid backdrop and a poignant metaphor for loss and resilience. The environmental themes are seamlessly woven into the story, enhancing its emotional impact without ever feeling didactic.

For readers who love sweeping, character-driven dramas with themes of love, regret, and redemption, Dream State is a triumph. It’s a novel that asks difficult questions and offers no easy answers, but its beauty lies precisely in this complexity. It's a deeply moving and unforgettable read.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dream State could have been more engaging. I found it budens the reader with verbose description and dictates the audience's sensory experience of the story. It took away from what was an interesting plot. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

This opus by Eric Puchner begins and ends at a wedding. This is NOT a spoiler as you know exactly how it ended at the start. It's a beautifully rendered tale of a marriage, the life of Cece and Garrett, and also the lives, peripherally, of Garrett's best friend Charlie. It starts with Charlie's wedding to Cece and how Garrett, the wedding officiant, ends up married to Cece instead.

This bare -bones description does not begin to describe the richness of the prose and the connections you form with the characters. They are all, even the next generation, three-dimensional living individuals. Garrett and Cece are unlikely soulmates. Garrett, a college drop-out, works for an environmental group that follows wolverines while it tracks them to their extinction in Wyoming, while Cece, also a drop-out, becomes an independent bookstore owner who blows her chance of success when hosting a famous author at a reading.

Charlie is an anesthesiologist who marries unsuccessfully, several times, and raises two children, also unsuccessfully. None of this describes the scope of this novel. Its glorious prose, its description of lakes, clouds, sunsets, storms, fires and of Salish, Montana over many years, of skiing runs and tragedy, parenthood and drug addiction, a changing environment, aging and illness. This complex novel travels many years into the future (yes, our future too) and ends as it began, back a t Cece's wedding. Finishing this novel, I sat breathed deeply, trying to return to my own reality.

Thank you to Net Galley and Doubleday for allowing me to read an early copy of this fine book.

Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC. I do not think I was the right audience for this book. I was hoping for more “dream-like” situation between the 3 main characters. I only liked some parts in the book.

"Dream State" is beautifully written and starts off strong. Yet, halfway through the book the narrative started to drag and it was difficult to engage with enough to push through to the end. Recommended for readers who love a great sentence, and/or don't mind books with many characters and narratives to follow. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: April 8, 2025.

#DreamState

Thank you to @NetGalley and @DoubleDay for an advanced copy of this book. I appreciate that they recognized that this book was something I would like based on another book I enjoyed. This book was very well written and I enjoyed reading it. However, it was very character heavy and going through the whole life of 6 people felt like a lot. I also didn't love how disjointed it was. Finding out someone got divorced or died was just like oh by the way. All the characters had major flaws, made bad decisions and I felt like I had no one to root for. The writing was very good but I just felt like the story was not that great.

interesting book about relationships and coming back and a marriage that didn't happen. Very interesting and really enjoyed learning more about the area and their jobs.

Dream State was an engaging, thought provoking novel that delves into the meaning of marriages, fate and consequences of decisions, and our climate crisis. Garrett, who marries his best friend’s almost wife, is the underdog- of the two friends he is the least likely, it would seem, to have the charmed life that he has. All this as he watches his friend’s life crumble after being invited back in his life. This is a u unique story and a really great read.
It did take me some time to really care about the characters and connect to them, but it is truly worth the wait. The story gets more interesting and the characters more complex with each page.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC.

In Eric Puncher’s “Dream State”, pivotal moments and moral choices cast a lengthy
shadow over the lives of Cece, Charlie, and Garrett.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained perplexities are largely unfolding on Salish Lake in Montana.

Salish, Montana, was one of those western towns caught in a strange moment of transition. It had begun as a Native American trading post, then had reinvented itself for many years as a logging center, and recently had reinvented itself once again as a thriving tourist destination for outdoor recreators.

Choices made are muddled under a pervading feeling of guilt that permeates and percolates a lifetime grasp of the past and an avenue to imagine possible futures.

Arousing tantalizing storytelling that slows down our minds while dismantling our hearts engages us from the start.
The wonderful-gripping beginning is strong!!!

College roommate, best-bud, Garrett, officiating the wedding has fallen in love with Charlie’s fiancé, Cece.
Uh-oh!
Charlie wanted to tell Garrett that he loved him like a brother, but it felt too funny for him to really say.
“Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel. It was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang, the rhythm itself said the important things, the non-jokey things, so you wouldn’t have to”.

Cece met Charlie when he was a surgical resident at John Hopkins-second year.
Cece was in medical school too. She ended up, dropping out her second semester, but they bonded over missing Los Angeles where they were both from.

Cece and Charlie were getting married in Charlie’s old family house in Montana. Friends were to flying in from the East Coast and West Coast.

A small quibble….
There were a few extraneous characters …. with other disparate threads to weave.
I was less interested in scenes when Cece, Charlie, or Garrett left a page or two …but it’s a ‘small’ quibble…
It was the intimate stories we learn from and about Cece, Charlie, and Garett… that made me love this novel most.
I was even left thinking about the ways people try to do good by their lives … yet come up against their own lascivious hunger.

I enjoyed this contemporary story. Despite a few dips of lost intensity….
the three main characters and themes alone held my interest.
Be it change, impermanence,
adversity, unconscious desires, surreal sensory experiences, love, loss, betrayal, grief, jealousy, illness, death, the effects of natural disasters, and the beauty of Montana itself, (the glaciers and sparkling lakes especially), were compelling.
The core essence of this story
speaks to the human conditions we call life.

4.5 rating!