What would happen if your wildest dreams came true? In Reverie the subconscious is made real. It’s a story of secrets, the search for power, and choosing to trust.
Summary
Ryan La Sala’s debut fantasy is an #OwnVoices story following Kane Montgomery, a gay teenager piecing his life back together after an attack robs him of his memories. As Kane searches for who he was, he uncovers a war for the creative rights to reality itself, each battle played out in an imagined world turned real: a reverie.
Reveries are worlds born from a person’s private fantasies, and once they manifest they can only be unraveled by bringing their conflicts to resolution. Reveries have rules and plots, magic and monsters, and one wrong step could twist the entire thing into a lethal, labyrinthine nightmare. Unraveling them is dangerous work, but it’s what Kane and The Others do.
Or did, until one of The Others purged Kane of his memories. But now Kane is back, and solving the mystery of his betrayal is the only way to unite his team and defeat reality’s latest threat: Poesy, a sorceress bent on harvesting the reveries for their pure, imaginative power.
But what use might a drag queen sorceress have with a menagerie of stolen reveries? And should Kane, a boy with no love for a team that betrayed him, fight to stop her, or defect to aid her?
Reverie is about the seduction of escaping inwards, about the worlds we hide within ourselves, and the danger of dreams that come true.
Review
Reverie is like walking through your dreams. It’s a world of fantasies made real and dangerous. I can’t even imagine what would happen if someone walked through my dreams and I pulled bystanders into my dreams. It would be terrifying. But Reverie is more than just a walk through your dreams, it’s a story about friendship and our search for power and ourselves. We begin searching for memories and moments we cannot place.
There is humor that will make you laugh out loud and it plays with tropes in our dreams. But Reverie is more than just the funny moments, it also asks us what will we sacrifice to get what we want? It’s undeniably queer and features a drag queen sorceress along with other queer characters. In these reveries, our dreams, fears, and desires are revealed. They aren’t just fragments of our waking dreams, but it’s about what they represent to us. Kane’s skill at unraveling these reveries demands a thorough understanding of what they represent.
Overall,
Does it matter the methods we use to extract what we want? To save the ones we love? What is the importance of our own agency? Reverie examines these consequences and decisions. It’s about the methods we use with our power. What and who we choose to sacrifice. Just because we may want the same things, doesn’t mean we have to do the same things to get there.
At the same time, Reverie is about choosing to trust people and see past our expectations. People have the ability to lie and manipulate us, but if we are always expecting this, then how can we trust those around us? We have to choose to trust. To dig past expectations, misunderstandings, to see people for the real and flawed people they are.
Find Reverie on Goodreads, Amazon, Indiebound & The Book Depository.