Review: Where Dreams Descend

Discussion

I am a sucker for Carnival-themed stories, featuring any of the following: magicians, phantoms, icy streets, circuses, caramel popcorn, and tango-style-passionate love affairs. Where Dreams Descend delivers on them all!

This book had me riveted for the first 100 pages … and the tension between the two characters at the beginning?! Yes, please. Only three problems:

1. I am not sure if there was supposed to be any tension here and maybe I was misreading the situation and maybe it slightly makes me a pervert for wanting or misreading that romantic tension?? And these are not questions I want to be warring with as a reader and …

2. It was over so flipping fast and …

3. I.Hate.Love.Triangles!! They never, ever pick the one I root for.

For me what started strong began to fizzle, or at least failed to continue to hold my attention with that “star-eyed gaze” I began with. The plot began to lag, dragging along through a pretty sluggish middle. I struggled at times to understand what was going on, because in order to create that whimsical, misty, swirling, chaotic world Kallia was experiencing, Janella Angeles writes, at times, very incompletely. While it understandably is a great tactic to create tension, the ambiguity, rather than weaving a spell, just had me befuddled. So much so that I had to cancel the audiobook in order to read it myself because I was constantly lost.

This had a big hill to climb in my Phantom of the Opera/The Night Circus obsessed heart, because I was always going to compare it back to these great titans of subject.

This has all the elements any Carnival-themed-loving girl would want, and while the story started out strong, for me, it failed to maintain the glitter and sparkle. I found the middle to flounder and the love interest that crackled on the earlier pages, really was only a fraction of the total book … and I’m still not sure if it was even supposed to be a love interest! While the ambiguous writing was a great tactic to further the elements of atmospheric tension, I often found myself lost in the incomplete thoughts of the characters. Still, Where Dreams Descend is a strong debut that delivers on inclusivity, a fiery heroine, and some likeable side characters  … An exciting beginning with a dramatic, suspenseful ending but unfortunately a middle that left me bored.

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Caraval

Written by Stephanie Garber

Published by Flatiron Books

You can find it here: Bookshop.org