Fantasy/Young Adult
397 Pages
Published by Sourcefire Books (3rd December 2019)
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My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Sourcefire Books, and the author via Netgalley, exchange for an honest review.
Actual rating of 3.5
All Kane can remember is that the police pulled him from the river after he supposedly drove his car into an abandoned mill in the Cobalt Complex. They keep asking him, why? But he doesn’t know. He can’t remember anything. With the threat of jail time looming over his head, he tries desperately to unravel the reality of what happened that night. With people he didn’t remember knowing helping him along the way, he finds that his world has completely changed, and he’s not sure it’s for the better. Imaginations turn dangerous, and the truth is almost as terrible. Will Kane be able to get to the bottom of this mystery with his relationships, morals and mind still intact?
I read a couple of reviews for this book and regretted not coming across it on Netgalley as it sounded so amazing. I, however, was in luck. The book had been made available to read now and I jumped straight on it. I don’t know why I left it sitting in my Netgalley TBR pile for so long, but it is what it is, I guess.
This story was an incredibly fantastical young adult story, and I did enjoy it. In the beginning, certain situations gave me serious creep vibes which were backed up by the fact that Kane Montgomery can not remember a damn thing. Nothing. At all. He knows that something happened, and he knows that it’s not what the Police think, but beyond that, he just has no idea. For some reason, that seemed so terrifying to me. As the story progresses things begin to make sense, and it’s not so much scary anymore, which I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed about. I was really hoping the slight horror vibe I got at the start was going to carry on through the rest of the novel. But it wasn’t to be, and that’s okay.
Now, I don’t want to go into too much detail with certain things because I feel like going into the book mostly blind is a good way to read this one. But I’ll try my best. There is a lot going on in this story, like, a massive hell of a lot. You have the mystery of what really happened that night, which is slowly unraveled through the story. You have the revelation of WHY what happened, happened. And you also have this group of seemingly superhero type characters who are fighting for the good of the world from these imagination worlds turned real which are referred to as Reveries. From my understanding, the Reveries are worlds that someone creates in their head, and for some reason, they have started to migrate into the real world in Kane’s town, and it can be dangerous because people can actually die in them. I’m not going to go into the how and the why any deeper, because as said above. Going in mostly blind is a good idea.
The characters were well written and unlike a lot of other young adult novels that incorporate LGBTQ+ characters, I felt like this one was real. There’s been a couple of stories that I’ve read where they’ve included these characters and I felt like they did it purely to have the token LGBTQ+ character and reach a broader audience. This story however, I felt did it beautifully. At no point is do the character’s question who they really are or anything like that. They are comfortable in their sexuality and embrace it as much as they can. This I absolutely loved. I know not every person is as comfortable or has found themselves totally yet, and that’s okay, I just feel like it was nice reading a story where the character’s sexualities weren’t the focal point. They were just people, going about their lives, trying to fight magical worlds and stop them from murdering people. Each character had their own distinct personalities and voices. Though I must admit, I only really cared about Kane, I didn’t even really care about his sister that much, though I do wish he would have stopped avoiding her so hard as it became annoying after a while that he was all “Oh Sophia’s angry at me again” when he caused it from doing the same damn thing again and again and again. I get why he was, but it became a bit annoying after a while.
As said earlier, there was a hell of a lot going on in this book and it was becoming quite convoluted, though I think I got the gist of how the worlds worked. It felt like the whole book was almost one giant info dump, but it made some kind of sense in the end. I also just didn’t feel like I was super invested in the story. I enjoyed it and there was a couple of good quotes in there, and the message (I think) was good, but after I finished it it was just one of those “yeah it was alright” books. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it. It was alright.
The world. There is a lot happening. Because we have the normal world, and then we have the reveries. A lot of story time was taken up by the three…odd….reveries that we encounter, I think there was mainly three. And while it’s good to have action, I just felt like no story or plot points were really being resolved in them. It almost felt like they were there to take up some word count and page space, but nothing really happened except the story in the reverie playing out. I dunno, it just sat funny with me, and I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
All in all, this was an alright book, and I did enjoy it. I felt like the LGBTQ+ community was represented beautifully and I really liked Kane as a character. If you want a fantastical young adult read, give it a go, you might love it.
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