★

I wanted to love Reverie by Ryan La Sala so much!

Reverie has a wonderful cover that draws you in immediately. The plot mentions a boy and a fantasy world that revolves around dreams. Everything I hoped this book would be – it wasn’t.

Kane is a gay teenager who is trying to pick up the pieces of his life back together after an attack leaves him with no memories of the past. He is in the search of who he is and who he was, and he discovers an alternate reality that he was involved in.

Reveries are worlds born from a person’s private fantasies, and once they manifest they can only be unraveled by bringing their conflicts to a resolution. Reveries have rules and plots, magic and monsters – anything you could wish for. And one wrong step can twist the entire thing into a lethal nightmare maze.

Sounds complicated already?

What if I told you that this is only from the blurb and the book doesn’t really explain these things at all?

Kane is an unraveler, together with The Others. Or at least he was, until one of The Others purged Kane of his memories. And here we are now, with Kane trying to solve the mystery and fight against evil.

I jumped into this book very eagerly, and was disappointing immediately, within the first couple of pages. The reveries and their whole concept were quite confusing, to the point of me not knowing whether the characters are now in a reverie, or in their real world.

Reverie had an amazing concept and it could’ve been done way better than this. I am just disappointed. It all seemed a bit messy and felt like it wasn’t thought through…

I didn’t connect with any of the characters, except for Kane, for the below reasons. And that was it… I didn’t care about any of the others, and there were quite a few characters.

One thing that annoyed me about Reverie, was the exaggeration of the #OwnVoices.

I am not against it, on the contrary! I love equality and I love diversity, and I share love everywhere and to everyone, and if you know me in real life, you will know this about me. We are all equal and different at the same time, and that is the unique thing that connects us all.

However, this book keeps mentioning that Kane is gay. And Kane is a lovely character. He is smart and he is brave. His memories were lost and is desperately trying to find out who he is, who he was, who are his true friends, who is good and who is evil. He doesn’t take for granted on what people tell him. He is AMAZING. Kane was so much more than just gay. But the author kept trying so hard to put an #OwnVoices hashtag on this book, that is was quite aggressive and off-putting. I love books that feature #OwnVoices, but Ryan, please – a little bit of modesty would’ve been nice.

I keep feeling this pressure of trying to write a book review that will not offend anyone, and I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I need to say that sometimes, there can be such a thing as “too much OwnVoicing” in a book. And we shouldn’t be afraid to point it out!

I am really sad about this one, guys. Honestly, I expected it to love it so bad, and now I feel down. I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you think you will love it, please pick it up. You are valid!

Thank you to the team at Netgalley and the publisher, Sourcebooks Fire, for sending me an ARC e-copy of this book, in exchange for my honest review.

Purchase Links:
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