We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. An Oprah's Book Club pick, Eric Puchner's "Dream State" (Doubleday) is a sweeping saga that explores how choices – big and small – shape lives and families for decades. It starts, very charmingly, with the planning for a wedding at a summer house in Montana.
Cece is about to marry Charlie, but then Charlie's best friend shows up, and their plans veer off in ways nobody expects. Read an excerpt below. "Dream State" by Eric Puchner Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.
By the time it occurred to Cece that her mother was dying, she was dead. Even then, it seemed like possibly a mistake, like there was no way in hell her mother would have agreed to it. Cece hunched through the memorial service, unable to speak or move or smile.
People hugged her, one after another, a series of random blows. At the national cemetery, she stood on the perfect lawn rolling down to a smudge of ocean in the distance, the tombstones a run of dominoes waiting to be tipped, feeling like she'd been beamed to an alien planet. She could not fathom her own fingers.
It was a military burial, with guards of honor and a flag-folding ceremony and a lone bugler playing "Taps." The long, sorrowful notes floated over the cemetery, turning everything into the tragic plot point in a movie: the gravesites and their wilting flowers, the guards of honor frozen like statues, the hole in the ground where he.
