The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (Gordon Dahlquist)
Wow. Now that’s a title, isn’t it? Curious, evocative and even a bit over the top? Yes, yes and yes — and the same holds true through the whole book.
Now, I’m a reader that’s perhaps a bit dryer and more intellectual about it than some. I try to read the award winners, of course, but also just those authors that seems to squeeze art out of the words, where some are content to simply stamp them down in a straight line, a yellow brick road. But I will have to use the words of cheesy summer movie critics here and call The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters a “rollicking good time.”
We enter mysterious London (I assume it’s London, at least, because it’s never specified in this strange, new reality) with the character of Miss Celeste Temple. She’s a rich girl from some island colony, self-assured and brash, who has been thrown over by her fiancé for unknown reasons. To find the explanation for her sudden jilting, she follows her ex to a mysterious, masked gathering. She is assumed to be one of the — ahem — more disreputable ladies attending, dressed in a scanty silk costume and given tantalizing details about some kind of process, some kind of sexual deviance, some kind of power game. But when she is sniffed out as an uninvited guest, Miss Temple is thrown into dangerous waters and must fight for her life out of the sticky web of privilege and secrecy she stumbled into.
Enter our other main characters: a dangerous man for hire with a love of poetry and a German doctor attached to the party of a visiting prince. All three find themselves immersed in a conspiracy and must sort out clues as the supernatural and perhaps occult situation at hand if they want to survive — if they want the world as they know it to survive.
From there, the rollicking goes on for some 700 addictive pages of fun. Is it always realistic? No. In fact, it goes over the top with chases, escapes, murders, alchemy, salvations, sex, blue glass and flying machines. But does the action throw the reader? Ha! In this world, anything is possible. And the evil cabal that is trying to bring about this “anything” must be stopped.
Will this book win any prizes or get my intellectual juices flowing? I don’t think so. But I had a hell of week polishing of this sundae of delicious fun.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars – Book club selection
Fiction |