#remember when I reviewed the DIviners and I said Jericho was my favourite

[tshepiso-reads-books]

Prepare For a Rant | Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

Started: February 10th, 2020

Finished: February 14th, 2020

I have a lot of thoughts about Lair of Dreams [Goodreads] and most of them are negative. It took me what felt like several lightyears to finish this book and the reading experience sapped the joy of reading out of me for a while. This is going to be a long one folks, so buckle in. Before we jump into things I’d like to warn that this is going to be a spoilerific review so heed my warning before you jump in.

Lair of Dreams takes place shortly after the events of the first book in this series The Diviners. The city is on the cusp of an all-out outbreak as more and more cases of Sleeping Sickness, a mysterious illness that causes the afflicted to fall asleep and never wake up again, are cropping up in Chinatown. While the gang goes on wildly different adventures in this book they all ultimately come together to solve the mystery of the sleeping sickness.

On Character

My biggest problem with this book is the characters. They’re selfish, self-centered, naïve and don’t understand that actions hurt others. This is most evident in Evie, but every character in the book has moments of this scattered throughout the novel. However,  I feel uncomfortable throwing this fact as a criticism of the book because all of these characteristics are fundamental character traits of teenagers and I find it obtuse to criticize a young adult novel for accurately writing teenaged protagonists. But I can’t divorce this understanding from how absolutely infuriating I found so many moments in this book.

I will say just because our protagonists, and especially Evie, were annoying doesn’t mean they didn’t have depth. Libba Bray is a good writer and fully fleshed out every character in this book mellowing some of my frustrations with them. The perfect example of this is Sam Lloyd. The bad boy character archetype has been done to death in YA, but Sam stands apart from the crowd of tousled haired edge-lords by having a tragic backstory with legitimate weight to it. His search for his mother never felt like an afterthought or quirk. I genuinely felt his deep desire to find the truth and it made him well rounded. The same could be said about all the other characters in the story.

Evie was the only character I truly hated while reading this book. I understand the reason why Evie is the way she is and how her past influenced her bad behavior. But understanding that her PTSD and trauma are the cause of her actions was never enough to get me to sympathize with her. Every single character in this book has been through just as much if not more than she has and they never went as far as to abandon and betray their friends as consistently as Evie did. I could never get behind Evie, her selfishness went above and beyond teenaged immaturity and her inability to own up to her mistakes and change angered me.

Now on to Jericho Jones, my second least favorite character in this book. I genuinely liked Jericho in The Diviners, but his behavior in this book was appalling. I will admit he had the misfortune of falling into one of my least favorite tropes out there: “The Monster Inside Me“ [TV Tropes]. However, his particular brand of self-loathing went further than that. At the end of The Diviners Jericho was rejected by Evie causing a cycle of self-pity that verged on incel behavior. His constant monologuing about how “girls just don’t like guys him” was eye-roll inducing and his hurry to lash out at others because a girl he liked rejected him was gross. His actions depict a man who sees Evie as a prize rather than a human being.

Another problem I had with this book is how central protagonists from The Diviners were sidelined in the novel. It’s almost impossible in a reasonably sized book to follow eight different characters and give them all their due. The characters I feel most negatively effected by Bray’s shift in focus to new POVs were Memphis, Theta and Mabel. It would take over 500 more words to deep dive into my specific thoughts on each of their character arcs so in summation: these three were barely given anything to do and their character arcs didn’t move forward in any significant way. Mabel was given the harshest treatment of all because she had literally nothing to do in this book but pine after a guy who didn’t like her. No other character conflict she had from the previous book in this series was even mentioned or explored.

On Romance

Possibly my least favorite element in this book was its romantic subplot. So much page time was dedicated to it that it could reasonably be dubbed the main plot So here’s the rundown:

Mabel likes Jericho, but Jericho likes Evie.

Evie thinks she likes Jericho but doesn’t want to date him because of girl code.

Evie fake dates Sam and they both start catching feelings.

Jericho goes out with Mabel even though he knows that Mabel likes him and he still has feelings for Evie.

This is the kind of conflict I hate in books. This love triangle was so convoluted and contrived. It did nothing but make me hate Evie and Jericho, and I found none of the romantic tension exciting because the dynamics explored were built on a foundation of miscommunication and lies of omission.

On Representation

While I was pleasantly surprised by the anti-racism in The Diviners I was uncomfortable by the way some of the themes of diversity were explored in this book. In Lair of Dreams, we are introduced to Ling Chang a half Chinese girl with a recent case of infantile paralysis causing her to wear leg braces. She has a lot of self-hatred in regard to her disability. This trope while cliche wasn’t my problem, my problem was how this internal conflict is resolved. Another one of our protagonists, Henry, finds out about her disability and all her self loathing is resolved by him telling her she should love herself. This interaction is that it places Ling’s self-worth in the hands of an able-bodied person rather than focusing this her arc on self-acceptance. As an able-bodied person, I don’t want to cry ableism without shouting out actual disabled people’s voices on the matter so I would highly encourage you to seek out these voices. I’ve yet to encounter an ownvoices reviewer’s thought on Ling’s arc (believe me I looked) and this observation should in no way take away anything from disabled people who appreciated Bray’s writing.

There is so much that Bray does right when it comes to diversity and representation. I find her honest depictions of America’s ugly history timely and relevant and I admire her willingness to starkly show anti-semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, police brutality of the time. She clearly parallels America’s history with America’s present reminding you not so subtly that these toxic ideas still exist. I will warn readers that Bray graphically depicts racist imagery and I found the descriptive scenes of lynch mobs and the like very upsetting so be prepared for that.

One aspect of Bray’s depiction of American society I really liked was her pointed observation of the link between Evangelical Christianity and racism and xenophobia. I also liked how she depicted the ways people use American Exceptionalism (the idea that Americans are inherently superior to all others and that their position as a dominant world power is a God-given right rather than luck and historic subjugation) as a justification for bigotry and all detractors of this ideology is consistently labeled as anti-American by the people who benefit from bigotry.

On Everything Else

I will say Lair of Dreams was fairly well-plotted. Though the mystery element of this book very much felt like a subplot with the character conflicts taking center stage. While I didn’t find the sleeping sickness as outright terrifying as Naughty John in the first book Bray is good at building tension and suspense and the final climactic scene did get my heart racing. Bray’s ability to capture a creepy gothic atmosphere shines in this book and I loved her interlude chapters that showed brief snippets of our characters and the city itself.

Stars 🌟🌟🌟

I don’t know where I stand with this series. I found so much of the reading experience frustrating, but I am still invested in so many of the characters in the series and I would like to see how the final mystery unfolds. We’ll see if I continue on with the series because right now I don’t know.