Dream Girl

Dream girl is a series of vignettes about young women testing, tasting, exploring and experimenting with life. It is a dreamy time of life - or is it? The girls are immersed in relationships, many of which are LGBTQ.

Dream girl stories focus primarily on love explored through people, pets, places and the inanimate. There is competitiveness and obsessiveness. Author Joy Holley captures girls' lives in all their intensity, fantasy and realism. Messy, confusing, imaginative, fearful experiences contrast with simple reality.

Alice purchases a heart-shaped bed fulfilling a longstanding fantasy, then willingly displaces the boyfriend who, due to the size of the bed, is forced to sleep on the floor.

Throughout Dream Girl, the character Wallace (they/them) provides a recurring thread of love and desire.

Scared of disappointing Wallace whom she has a crush on, vegetarian Eve agrees to try some kina shellfish: “It tastes all wrong: like a fish milkshake. I make a face and Wallace laughs with delight.”

Holley has a deft metaphorical touch. In Material Girl an unrequited lover observes the gift of a manuka twig with only two flowers “but doubted you’d (her ex) thought about this at all”.

Holley also weaves historical events such as referencing the 1954 Mazengarb Report ‘Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents’ where “girls call all across the city: turning the telephone wires into a web of whispers.” Unhealthy hysteria abounds.

In Dream Girl, each story invites the reader to fully experience life. I’m sure the reader will be well entertained when entering the window of each story.

Content advisory: Some stories are very explicit.