Shelf Awareness--Reverie

YA Review: Reverie

Reverie by Ryan La Sala (Sourcebooks Fire, 416p., ages 14-up, 9781492682660, December 3, 2019)

Ryan La Sala's debut is a darkly imagined, riveting fantasy that delves into the unlimited potential of getting lost in one's dreams. When Kane wakes in the hospital, he can't remember the accident. Apparently, he rammed his dad's car into an old mill and needed to be pulled from the Housatonic River. The car had "exploded on impact... the mill, and everything within fifty feet of it, was scorched." The police think "the whole thing" was "deliberate and thought out," suicidal even, and they want answers. So Kane, accompanied by sister Sophia, trespasses at the historical site in an effort to clear his name. As Kane wanders, struggling to remember, something "huge and spider-like" emerges and chases them from the mill.

Kane undergoes a psych evaluation, where the dazzling Dr. Poesy warns Kane that his "story takes place within a much larger story”--a story that is bigger than the East Amity Police investigation and potentially dangerous. In fact, a local painter has disappeared and Dr. Poesy strongly hints Kane may be a suspect. Dr. Poesy says they will help Kane as long as Kane keeps a journal in which he must write anything he remembers about his "incendiary" incident.

Back at school, Kane learns that he has a small, close-knit group of friends who call themselves "The Others"; they, like the experience of the accident, have "been cut from his memory entirely." Kane, seeking information, eavesdrops on them debating how to handle him and his missing "powers." Another "reverie" will be happening soon, they say, and it's Kane who has always unraveled them. This time, however, the group agrees they must keep him away. Furious with all the secrets and needing to learn more, Kane seeks out the reverie, finding himself in a "crazy fantasy" involving "a subterranean civilization that worships a god called the Cymo." Kane has to somehow survive until the reverie becomes "unstable" and starts to "collapse," at which point he is supposed to unravel it--if he can remember how.

In East Amity, where dreams actually do become real, readers feel the tangible danger as the "fantastic realities people lovingly [create] for themselves" spin out of control. Like so many others in Reverie, Kane wants to believe he can escape into the "intoxicating potential" of dreams. But, before the end of this thrilling narrative, Kane must either come to terms with fighting "for a reality that fails so many, so often" or, instead, fight to change it. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI.

Shelf Talker: After surviving an accident of which he has no memory, Kane discovers it's up to him to save his town from dreams that magically become real.