Dreamhunter and Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox.

These books are: bright, fresh, and creative.
Other elements: dreams, family, the greater good, government corruption, golem-esque creatures.
Read them: if you enjoy reading fantasy with interesting and unusual magic.
Overall rating: 7.5/10

I really enjoyed reading the Dreamhunter duet. First of all, they’re a duet: you get more than one book, but you don’t have to wade through a million pages to find out what happens. It also didn’t hurt that both books are finished and I had them at the same time: I feel like everything I start these days turns out to be part of an unfinished series.

My favorite thing about this little series is the work that Knox created. The concept of Dreamhunters is fascinating and felt really unique. A Dreamhunter is a person – the ability is inborn, you have it or you don’t – who has the talent to capture certain dreams. Once a dream is captured, a Dreamhunter has the ability to broadcast it: anyone sleeping near them as they dream the dream will experience it too. Some dreams are happy, some bittersweet, some terrifying. The intensity of the dream – and its aftereffects, if any – depends on the Dreamhunter’s skill.

The first novel, Dreamhunter, is about Laura and Rose, two young cousins born into a family of great Dreamhunters. In this book, Laura and Rose reach the age at which they’re going to be tested for Dreamhunter ability. This first novel primarily serves to introduce the reader to the characters and the world they live in, while also revealing that there may be nefarious things afoot behind the scenes. It becomes apparent that thing might not be quite as they seem.

In Dreamquake, the nefarious things that seemed to be coalescing in Dreamhunter become urgent and are addressed by our heroines. That’s an extremely vague overview, but I don’t want to give anything away! There is adventure and intrigue and magic. And family secrets, and ball gowns.

The only thing I didn’t love about the Dreamhunter duet was the ending. It was just a little too abrupt and a little too complicated; I felt like I didn’t quite have time to be convinced of what was happening before the book ended. I was trying just now to review the final chain of events in my head and I don’t think I ever made enough sense out of it to retain it. It was disappointing to get to the end of such a great duet and not feel like the final chapter lived up to the preceding storylines.

The Dreamhunter duet is still very much worth reading, though. Well-written, unique fantasy is too valuable a commodity to ignore just because the ending wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for .

And if any of you follow my Book Riot posts: Dreamquake is the book I was reading when the prosciutto incident occurred.

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The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.

This book is: amazing.
Other elements: loneliness, love, far away places.
Read it: if you want to read something out of the ordinary.
Overall rating: 10/10

I’ve been avoiding reviewing The Book of Strange New Things for ages. Not because I don’t enjoy thinking about it, but because I loved it – really, truly LOVED it – and I have no idea how to explain it to you.

This book involves so many elements that I don’t normally like to read about. It’s set in our world, slightly in the future, in a time when everything is a mess (more natural disasters, pollution out of control, etc). There are aliens. The main character is a Christian missionary. If I had seen it on a shelf and read the back copy, I probably would have put it back down.

Instead of feeling like it was about aliens, religious colonialism, the doomed-ness of our society, space travel, or any of those things, this book just ended up feeling like it had something quiet and true to say about people and the nature of life. It made me think about the world and how people see each other, and why, and if things are as they should be.

When pressed, I describe The Book of Strange New Things as a fantastic work of literary fiction that happens to contain aliens.

I don’t know if you’ll like it as much as I did, but I bet you’d at least think it’s interesting. I’m normally a quick reader, but I savored The Book of Strange New Things for at least three weeks because it gave me so much to consider.

If you’re open to reading something unusual that I thought was great, you should give this one a shot.

My thanks to Edelweiss and Hogarth for providing me with a copy of The Book of Strange New Things for review consideration.

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The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine.

This book is: a 1920’s dance hall retelling of the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.
Other elements: family, sisters, duty over love, self-identity, dancing, the 1920’s.
Read it: if you enjoy historical fiction, 1920’s dancing, and stories about sisters.
Overall rating: 8/10

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a retelling of the classic fairy tale about the Twelve Dancing Princesses – which, I will tell you right up front, is not a fairy tale I ever considered interesting enough to retell. I had to Wikipedia it just now to remind myself of the salient points (other than “dancing” and “princesses”).

Genevieve Valentine took the story of the princesses, translated it into the world of a wealthy 1920’s widower and his brood of neglected daughters, and turned the whole thing into the seed for a fabulous and completely new novel. The princesses in The Girls at the Kingfisher Club are a dozen sisters who live alone in a large house with a controlling, neglectful father and begin sneaking out to dance at night as a way to taste the vitality of life that they so desperately crave. The girls’ desires to evolve into their own respective independent selves is a counterpoint to their ongoing war with their father and the adventure of the dances that are their only bright point in their lives.

As I write this summary, I keep going back up to the top and giving this book a higher and higher rating. It really was exceptionally well done, with such an original concept. Not to mention the fact that it takes some doing to create 12 characters in identical circumstances and manage to give them distinct personalities. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is rich, vivid, unique, and features strong lady characters set in the 1920’s. What more could I want?

My one quibble – very possibly because I read in this in February and when it was cold and dark outside and the sky is so gray  – is that I would have liked a little more happiness in this novel. I wanted something hopeful and light to weave into the anxious darkness of the majority of the story. I’m an older sister (just to one younger, not 11) but the idea of having so many sisters to look after in such dire straits was pretty distressing to me and I desperately wanted to have a little bit more of an uplifting counterpoint to the overwhelming strife.

Despite that seasonally induced objection (remind me to get a sun lamp next winter), The Girls at the Kingfisher Club was a delightful read. If it sounds like your kind of thing, I recommend you check it out.

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