| Dreamhunter | Contributor: Beck | Posted: 06/03/07 | 19:44 |
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page 3 of 3 Anyway. The novel is not a difficult read, and in fact could even be classified as Young Adult, althought the content is meaty enough for older readers with a shelf and a half of novels under their belt. It is rather self-consciously pitched at a female audience though. Both of the main characters are female, the settings are sumptuous and fabulous, and well it's about dreams. Pretty much the opposite of the battles and monsters enjoyed by a unisex audience. Voyager's packaging of this solid novel will be hit-and-miss with readers at large. I totally judged this book by its cover - the heroine overcome on her gilded chaise-longe underneath an electric chandelier (obviously a very progressive 1906). Someone should tell the marketing department that just because a novel is about dreams, it shouldn't make you want to go to sleep just by looking at it. The blurb hardly picks the most compelling part of the novel to make a quick sale: Laura lay on her back and looked at the warm pool of candlelight on the ceiling. She knew she couldn’t climb back onto the dream that had tossed her and taken off without her. She could feel it still, like the beginnings of a fever….
The world of the novel is part confection, part alternate history. The map provided resembles the north end of New Zealand’s South Island, which can’t be a coincidence, since Knox lives in New Zealand and her fictional setting is a colony called Southland. New Zealand’s Farewell Spit could replace So Long spit, and no one would know the difference. Especially the names. Besides the map of a small part of Southland the book also contains rather detailed maps of The Place, which really aren’t very interesting. They mark the places of different dreams to be caught, only a handful of which are actually mentioned in the book. Still it's good to know the author has done a bit of world-building before jumping in to the novel proper. The characters are very real, but like the book, develop slowly. The two girls show the most development, leaving their older guardians behind. There is a bit of romance, for those who like that kind of thing, but it is purely innocent. There are no, shall we say, sticky dreams for instance, which would have been an interesting concept to explore. Still, while Laura’s banter with her fellow fledgling Dreamhunter companion Sandy (male, in this case) is amusing, but it’s blindingly obvious where Knox is leading these two. Dreamhunter isn’t very compelling at first, but if you can get through the tedium of the first parts of the book it becomes a lot more appealing at the end. In an attempt at building something more than a straightforward narrative, Knox leaves clue throughout the book, and it's undeniably satisfying when the pieces of the puzzle finally come together. At the end you realize that the opening of the novel wasn’t all pointless description of their fun family life, that important things are mentioned and hints dropped. The problem is that as you read them, you don't realise these are hints. Does mystery work if the reader doesn't even know it's mystery? Not whodunnit. Not whatsbindun. But rather, sorry I didn't realise anything had been done in the first place. While not as fast paced and dazzlingly imaginative as the cover makes it out to be, Dreamhunter is a worthy book for bedtime. Just don't be put off by the over-the-top cover. two and a half out of five
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