Fearsome Dreamer review

Fearsome Dreamer
Laure Eve
October 3rd 2013
Hot Key Books

There is a world where gods you’ve never heard of have wound themselves into hearts, and choice has led its history down a different path.
This is a world where France made a small, downtrodden island called England part of its vast and bloated empire.
There are people here who can cross a thousand miles with their minds. There are rarer people still who can move between continents in the blink of an eye.
These people are dangerous.
And wanted. Desperately wanted.
Apprentice hedgewitch Vela Rue knows that she is destined for more. She knows being whisked off from a dull country life to a city full of mystery and intrigue is meant to be. She knows she has something her government wants, a talent so rare and precious and new that they will do anything to train her in it.
But she doesn’t know that she is being lied to. She doesn’t know that the man teaching her about her talent is becoming obsessed by her, and considered by some to be the most dangerous man alive ...

Fearsome Dreamer is a rich, sumptuous, half-dystopic, half-fantasy, all fantastic book. I can hardly think of a bad thing to say about it, other than that it could at times be quite slow and that it took a while to get into the nitty gritty,  but it was time well spent on character building and world building and all that good stuff.

Rue and White weren't always likeable, but I really enjoyed seeing their stories converge, and the sort of realness to them. Rue had that teenage narcissism where she believes that she is destined for something more, and that she must be special (and she is special), and this can sometimes lead her to going about with the wrong sorts of people, but I admired the fact that had a strong sense of who she was. Her heart is in the right place for a lot of the book, and I'm curious to see how her story develops after how this book ended. White made a lot of mistakes, too, though. In fact, he was kind of a dick, but I think his story was really interesting, and while it slowed down the pace a bit, I think it was important for the book to start in the place that it did so that you could really get a sense of who the characters are and how they change over the course of the book.

Also, I think I'm going to have to dedicate a whole paragraph to Laure's writing. Like, I am not doing any justice to the book in this review and I know that, but if you have to take on thing from it, it's that Fearsome Dreamer is worth the read just because it is so beautifully written (and also because the rest of it is really good, but that sort of undermines the point I'm trying to make right now). Seriously, it's like Laini Taylor standard of fabulous beautiful writing. I just really want to read more stuff by her because the language was so vivid and descriptive and was like the cherry on top of an already really great book. So please, Laure, if you're reading this, keep on writing loads of stuff forever.

The world of Angle Tar and World was something that I really loved, too. It was beautifully developed and interesting to get to sort of know what caused Angle Tar to split from World in the first place. Also, the fact that Rue is Angle Tarain and White is from World meant that we got to see both places, though from the skewed perspectives of people who didn't want to be there. Angle Tar is England/Britain, and it definitely felt like a fantasy novel when reading about Rue's life as a Hedgewitch, as Angle Tar refused to become part of World and accept their elaborate technology, leaving it in the past. World, on the other hand, felt like being in a dystopian, where technology rules the lives of the people. Most of the people who live there are connected through a virtual platform called Life, so people rarely even leave their homes anymore because they just don't have to. Both Rue and White are dissatisfied with where they live and their situations and start to long for the other place. I just hope that they can figure out where their real home is, where they feel their happiest. That would be nice.

So this has been really short, and I really wanted to write more about this book so as to convince any one who reads this to read Fearsome Dreamer because I loved it and I want you to love it too. Just know this - it is reallllly good.