Reverie by Ryan La Sala

 

As the end of January approached, I wanted to power through another young adult books for my Clear the Shelves Challenge. I decided to start with Ryan La Sala's Reverie. I first noticed this young adult fantasy novel while browsing in Barnes and Noble and was really intrigued by the plot summary. It involved daydreams coming to life and wreaking havoc in the real world. I am a very elaborate daydreamer myself, and I thought that this was an excellent concept. I started reading thinking that I would relate to this book deeply and maybe find a guilty-pleasure favorite. Unfortunately, that did not end up being the case.

The plot of the novel follows Kane Montgomery, a teenager who has just been involved in a mysterious accident. He has been told that he stole his parents' car and drove it into an abandoned building, but he can't remember doing that, or the fiery explosion that occurred soon after. In fact, he can't remember the last several months of his life at all. It's obvious that something very strange happened to him and he is becoming increasingly frustrated trying to figure it out.

At the start of the story, an eerie encounter in the woods sets him on a path to discovering the truth about his accident. It turns out that Kane and three other kids from his school are in a group known as the Others, and they've been dealing with a strange magical phenomenon that has laid siege to their small hometown of Amity, Connecticut. Essentially, peoples' daydreams are becoming real and threatening to overtake the entire town with strange, alternate realities. Kane was the leader of this group before his accident. He had the ability to unravel the daydreams, or reveries, and return things to normal. His accident is somehow tied into all of this, but he doesn't remember how. As he struggles to put all of the pieces together, he must solve the mystery of what happened to him and relearn how to stop the reveries.  

This book was a frustrating read for me. The concept of it was very strong and creative, but I never felt like the story came together in a satisfying way. I think the decision to have Kane be struggling with amnesia was the biggest factor in this. It made the plot feel chaotic and confusing. It prevented me from forming connections with the characters or ever truly understanding how the magic in this world worked. Information would be passed to the reader in a scattered fashion, with Kane's friends continually called upon to explain key details about their situation that they had already figured out ages ago. Lots of telling instead of showing. It didn't feel organic and it made me wish that I reading along with the characters as they discovered these things, rather than the game of perpetual catch-up that the lost memory plot device necessitated. His memory loss is worked into a twist at the end of the story, but I honestly don't think the twist was worth the drawbacks across the text.

The amnesia also prevented me from connecting with Kane as a character. He spends a lot of the plot (understandably) confused, peevish, and argumentative. He's rude to his family and his friends. He has a romance in the book that feels rushed because all the build-up for it happened before the events of the novel start. Accordingly, I couldn't bring myself to feel invested in his story. Similarly, I felt nothing for the three other teenagers on his team. All of the relationship building with them happens off-page, so it was tough to get a real sense of who they were and what their real relationships to Kane were. 

Additionally, the details of this world were never really clear to me. I'm still not sure what exactly the reveries were, why they happened, or what the rules for magic are in the universe of the book. I know that some of this is intentional and that this is meant to be an unusual, dream-like story. There is a difference, though, between being entertained by a quirky, impossible plot and feeling like maybe the author didn't explain enough, and this book felt like the latter. Things just happen in this book, and there isn't enough of a foundation to the setting of the novel that allows the reader to make sense of it. At no point was I able to predict where the action was headed next, and not in a good way. It was just hard to determine the overall goal of the story. I was mildly confused and bored while reading. This took me way longer to finish than it should have, simply because I didn't want to pick it up.

However, all was not darkness here. Reverie definitely had some positive elements to it, the best one being its inclusivity. Kane is a gay character, and there are some secondary characters that are gay as well. The big villain in the story is a drag queen that uses she/her pronouns. There are characters of different ethnic backgrounds. It was clear that Ryan La Sala paid a lot of attention to this aspect of the novel and it was great to see. This diversity played into what I think was the most intriguing idea in the novel by far: the idea that Kane and his friends are able to fight the reveries because they have spent so much time earlier in their lives escaping into fantasy worlds to hide their own pain. Kane, a kid who tries to remain invisible to avoid being bullied over his sexuality, has spent a large amount of time escaping into the fantasy worlds of books and daydreams. In effect, he's been training all his life to deal with the reveries. This connection between personal pain and fantasy is one that a lot of readers can probably relate to. Unfortunately, this concept is only explicitly addressed in the text a few times. It felt like a missed opportunity to forge a deep connection with the audience.

The end of my copy of the novel included some bonus material that contained a message from Ryan La Sala explaining his reasoning and process behind writing the novel. This message was more relatable and emotional that anything in the actual book and it helped me understand where he was coming from and what he was trying to do much better. Honestly, it probably would have made for a better experience if I had read that part before the actual story. Ultimately, I think that's where my issues with the novel came from. The author was writing from a place of great emotion and purpose and was starting with a fantastic idea. However, all those positives really struggled to come through clearly in the text. So, for me, this wasn't a favorite. However, I don't doubt that La Sala's style will appeal to other readers. I'm going to donate Reverie, and hopefully it will find a home with someone who truly understands and enjoys it.

Challenge Tally

Clear the Shelves 2021: 5/50 (donate)

Total Books Read in 2021: 8