Second US Edition
 
  
First US Edition 
  Award-Winning Finalist of Best Book of the Year, 
BOTYA Award (2013) from the ForeWord Reviews

 

"Sunrise was all about hope, energy, and new beginnings. It was both tomorrow and today in the same moment."

A rollicking romp from East Coast to West with two free-spirited and artistic young women...with running themes of the demise of art for commercialism and the comparison of communism vs. capitalism.
__US Review of Books
 
Dream Junkies comes across as a forty years' later response to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying...Fascinating. Ares is a terrific writer; shrewd in observation and smoothly descriptive in prose and dialogue. It is suggested that all men as well as women caught in an unsatisfactory love life give Dream Junkies a read.
__San Francisco Review of Books 

I really loved this book. Everyone who lives in this country, immigrant and native born, can appreciate the struggle of wanting to find your niche here. This book is part friendship story and part self-soul searching story, has a little of everything. It has funny parts. It has sad parts. It has parts that will make you think. 
__A Bookish Affair 
 

In this entertaining novel, Ares sends New Yorkers Kitty Roman and Desert Rose on a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles in search of fun and fortune. While Desert Rose's pursuit of uncommitted boyfriend Charlie becomes increasingly frantic, Kitty finds her own wish for nonattachment conflicting with her desire to live life passionately. Amid the book's humorous side glances at pompous New York types and commercialism running rampant in the Los Angeles art world, Kitty's belief in fateful encounters pits her heart against what she terms the good-enough sense of commitment. Despite its philosophical trappings, this is an enjoyable read that offers a pleasingly light take on the old refrains of friendship, career paths, and romantic entanglements.

__Publishers Weekly 


A novel above its (literary romance) gender...Kitty, the main character, is well-versed in theater, knows something about politics, and makes an interesting parallel between the communism totalitarism in USSR and the capitalist one in US...A cool American adventure like ride the storm for go-west postmodern amazons. 
__Time  Out Bucharest 
 
The string of American adventures that Alexandra Ares devours in her book has some of the European interwar flavor and mystery described by Anglo Saxon writers of that era. This time the roles have reversed: a European discovers America. She is a sensitive, romantic and sometimes cynical writer, but surely courageous.
__Romanian Book Review  
 
In this analytical slice-of-life illustrating how romantic struggles know no borders... The alternately glamorous and gritty glimpses of L.A. and the consistently strong, realistic dialogue give the well-paced novel a cinematic feel. 
__Kirkus Indie Review 
 
Great character development...Couldn't stop reading the book. I was looking for the next Kitty conversation about fine art or about Manhattan or Romanian politics or the differences in dating in the U.S. versus Europe.
__The Ardent Reader
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                
 
 
   
 
                                                                           
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The year is 2005. The Congress has just approved the war in Iraq and many New Yorkers are fed up with the American Dream and thinking of fleeing the country.

Kitty Roman is one of them. She is disenchanted with the superficiality of the news industry in which she works, and in love she suffers from the malaise of her generation, the fear of landing and settling down. She packs to return to her native Europe, yet, a last minute chance encounter with an eccentric, overly optimistic artist, Desert Rose makes her embark impulsively on the trip of her lifetime -- to the West Coast.

The accidental odd couple takes us on a fascinating and sometimes hilarious journey from New York, filled with intellectual and artistic elites, to Los Angeles with its complicated movie moguls and bohemian art community. Although they have different views about love, life, and the American Dream -- one still believes in its magic and one doesn't -- at the end of the road they both follow their true passion. 

A gripping page turner in which self-irony and lucidity blend wonderfully with lyrical interludes, Dream Junkies offers the reader a deconstructed view of today's American Dream and an uplifting story of spiritual revival.
 
“Nah, the American Dream has become a cheat,” Desert Rose giggled.  “The scene has gotten too crowded.  In the last few years, many of my friends in their thirties, forties, and even fifties, people with graduate degrees or PhDs, had to move back in with their parents after squandering their savings and sandbagging themselves with big student loans for a second career because they couldn’t find jobs.  Last year, on Hanukah, I ran into a distinguished Jewish guy who used to buy and collect my art. He was selling shoes at Macy’s.”

“That’s pretty sad,” said Kitty.

“He was dressed in an impeccable navy suit, and he greeted me with the utmost dignity.  He offered to bring me a pair of shoes.  Before the recession, he used to sell millions of dollars worth of hi-tech wares.  Almost every week after 9/11, I’d run into a person who lost his or her job or was training their Indian replacement.”

 
Warning
This novel might offend readers who consider that criticizing the American Dream is unpatriotic.
 
The book is available at all the leading online retailers in paperback and electronic format.
 
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FAQ
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- Why did you write this book?
 
“This was my first novel, and, like many first novels, it's semi autobiographical. I wrote it in 2005, finished it in 2006, published it for the first time in translation in Romania in 2008 where it was a surprising success, and only recently published it in the US. It was hard to publish it in the US in the Bush years because the novel was quite critical of the involvement of US in Iraq and the decay of the American economy, foretelling in many ways the crisis of 2008 at a time when (almost) nobody was talking or writing about those things in mainstream media and publishing."  
 
- What is your book saying about the immigrant experience?

"That there are two types of immigrants.  One who comes here by choice (Kitty) and other brought by family and other circumstances (Desert Rose) and each relates differently to the American Dream. And there are immigrants who work in fields related to language (Kitty) and immigrants who work in fields where language is not that important, such as IT, business, medical, music or painting (Desert Rose). For the later type, integration is rather easy, while for the first (actors, writers, and journalists) integration is hell. They have to undergo a very painful and difficult process of rewiring their brains and re-inventing themselves through a new language they have to master, and very few can do pull it off. I've known many people who struggled with that until they re-invented themselves in another field. I am one of them. It's a very interesting process, that of having your entire identity shattered, and then re-built with different bricks and in an entirely new shape."

      - What else is Dream Junkies ?  

"A literary romance (in a genre closer to Erica Jong and far from Danielle Steel or Sylvia Day) about a generation that is no longer afraid of flying, but of landing and settling, a generation for which wanting more, and wanting something else has become an addiction. And a coming of age story of an odd couple of dreamers, two women on the edge of a breakdown." 
- What gave you the inspiration to write it?  

"I never intended to write the Great American Novel because I feared that I would never finish such a monumental task. At the time, I was fascinated by the series Sex and the City and noticed a fundamental lack: those women were very real when they discussed men and relationships, but, other than that, they existed in a timeless vacuum, without social and political context. I wanted to write an entertaining, contemporary novel about relationships and life in Manhattan and in the U.S. that was not simply done on a blank, glossy canvas, but on a background with a rich, complex texture that I knew very well.  And of course, there is always a trigger that sets our dreams and intentions to motion, and if you'll read Dream Junkies you'll know what was mine."

- How was writing a first novel in a second language? 

"In many ways, writing Dream Junkies was an adventure bigger than living it. It was like learning to walk again and doing a marathon after a car crash. Every writer has a life challenge that breaks him or her as a human being and makes him into an artist. For J.D. Salinger it was the war, for me it was the experience of exile and immigration."  
  
 
LIBRARY FAQ
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The MARC records of the novel are available on OCLC (WorldCat) and SkyRiver.   
You can order the book from Baker & Taylor.