Reverie by Ryan La Sala

*Spoiler free*

Reveries are worlds born from a person’s private fantasies, and once they manifest they can only be unraveled by bringing their conflicts to resolution. Reveries have rules and plots, magic and monsters, and one wrong step could twist the entire thing into a lethal, labyrinthine nightmare. Unraveling them is dangerous work, but it’s what Kane and The Others do. Or did, until one of The Others purged Kane of his memories. But now Kane is back, and solving the mystery of his betrayal is the only way to unite his team and defeat reality’s latest threat: Poesy, a sorceress bent on harvesting the reveries for their pure, imaginative power. But what use might a drag queen sorceress have with a menagerie of stolen reveries? And should Kane, a boy with no love for a team that betrayed him, fight to stop her, or defect to aid her? 

I’d seen this book here and there, but didn’t know much about it. The cover is absolutely gorgeous and gave me the push to find out more! It sounded really interesting and I really wanted to give it a shot. So, when I had the chance to get an ARC at BookCon, I took it. (Also, the author is wonderful and hilarious.)

Reading this book feels like when you drink something that’s flavored blue raspberry and your tongue turns blue. I know that’s a really weird analogy, but I think it fits really well! There’s even blue raspberry slushees in this book, so that’s even more evidence that I’m a complete weirdo.

This book was really, really cool. It’s the kind of cool that’s hard to describe. It also makes it hard to describe my feelings about it. It’s so different from anything I’ve read before, but it does what it’s trying to do really well. It’s a weird book, but it also feels really relatable. This book manages to be everything descriptor, paired with the ones that contradict them.

I loved the writing. It’s really dramatic and flowy and it feels like the author just goes for it. It’s like he didn’t hold back at all. The descriptions are so vivid and so full. Even if there are aspects of this book that I wouldn’t usually love or I’m confused about how I feel about them, the writing makes things that don’t make sense, make sense.

The reveries were really awesome. I loved how they managed to cram so many things into this book. It let the book be a dystopian, a fantasy, a sci-fi, and so much more, while it was all set in the real world. I find that absolutely fascinating. How reveries work and what they are is thrown at you really fast and kind of all at once. I thought I was going to be overwhelmed by it, but the pieces fall into place really nicely. I just really loved how they were done. They were so cool and it made for such awesome scenery and scenes, it was also a look into how people dream. And how people’s deepest wishes manifest and how they pull from everything around them.

I’m not sure how I feel about Kane. I honestly think that’s because I’m not the person who’s supposed to connect with him fully. But people are going to connect with him and really see themselves in him and I hope this book finds its way into their hands. I really liked the side characters! Ursula, Adeline, Elliot, Sophie, and Dean were all really amazing. I loved how their dreams and desires and actions all fed into the overall plot and overall themes of the book. They are all so well rounded and I loved them a lot.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the overarching plot, but I think it fits really well with the rest of the book. While some of the twists could have been done a bit better, I think it was done really solid overall.

Reverie is a flashy book with a lot of depth. Those two things work together to create something that is amazing to read. It doesn’t hold back in anything that it does.

Reverie comes out January 7, 2020! You can add it on Goodreads and pre-order a copy in the meantime!

Thank you for reading!