A posi-tute-ly delightful and terrifying sequel

[bloodygranuaile]

Considering how much I loved, loved, loved Libba Bray's The Diviners, I'm kind of appalled with myself that I apparently missed the publication of the sequel, Lair of Dreams. But something brought it to my attention again recently, so I made sure I'd snagged a copy as an ebook to read on the plane up to Nova Scotia last weekend. (BTW, I went to Nova Scotia last week!)

 

The book did not disappoint. Clocking it at around 600 pages, it's a big fat Gothic doorstopper of a YA fantasy, full of 1920s New York goodness, and also a fair amount of 1920s New York badness. The cast of characters is pretty big, with all our old favorites still around--Evie, Theta, Mabel, Henry, Memphis, Jericho, Sam Lloyd--and a couple of interesting new folks who pop up, the most prominent of which is Ling Chan, a mixed-race teen girl from Chinatown, who can walk in dreams. Ling Chan is cranky and brusque and loves science and can summon and talk to the dead in her dreams, and she has infantile paralysis in her legs, which she suspects might be some kind of divine punishment for her pride in her dreamwalking ability. She becomes friends with Henry, who it turns out is also a dreamwalker, and they meet and become friends in dreams before meeting in real life when things start to get weird.

 

The main plotline in the book involves a sleeping sickness that is spreading mysteriously across the city, first striking a bunch of subway laborers who had discovered and opened an abandoned subway station with a single train car in it, which nobody had known was there. If you guessed that this train car was haunted and the laborers let the ghost out by disturbing it, you are also familiar with the basics of how Gothics work, congrats! But that doesn't make it any less exciting, because all kinds of terrifying stuff has to happen for all the disparate characters to come together to figure out who the ghost is and how they are spreading the sleeping sickness and how to stop it, and meanwhile people are also disappearing and turning into ghastly toothy monsters in the subway (don't read this book if you're going to have to take a subway at night in the next year or two), and the authorities and a whole bunch of the populace are blaming the sleeping sickness on the Chinese immigrant community. Unsurprisingly, things get pretty racist, up to and including a Klan march, because the 1920s were terrible and oh god it's the 1920s all over again, isn't it.

 

So the fun mostly comic relief-y plotline going on through all of this is that Evie is now famous on the radio for doing object reading, and so she now lives in fancy hotels and throws parties until she gets kicked out and has to move into the next fancy hotel, and at some point during all this she ends up fake engaged to Sam for PR purposes, on condition that she help him learn more about the old government project that his mother used to be involved in--the one Evie's uncle Will, who runs the museum, was also part of. The bits with Sam and Evie and their ludicrous fake romance are freaking hilarious, involving creating loud diversions in post offices and all sorts of other nonsense. The stuff they find out about the government project is pretty dark, possibly even darker than the dream-eating ghosts in the subways, because it gets all mixed up with the eugenics movement. 

 

One of the things I like best about the book is the amount of American history that Libba Bray works into it--and she doesn't try to make it flattering. Between the two books, the series so far discusses eugenics, the Klan, the Sacco and Venzetti trial, spiritualism, the Second Great Awakening, polio, Chinese exclusion, sex trafficking, segregation, domestic abuse, and the Civil War. There's also a stealth mention of radium tonic, my new favorite terrifying historical detail, and a brief but highly plot-relevant cameo by Dr. Carl Jung. And there's Jake Marlowe, Charming Scientist Businessman Inventor Dude, a vehicle by which Libba Bray provides Pointed Commentary on the links between American exceptionalism, capitalism, the modernist approach to science, and the aforementioned eugenics movement. 

 

One minor disappointment I had was that I wanted to see more of Mabel's new anarchist buddy that she met at the end of the first book, but he is gone for most of this one, but then he shows up right at the end, and at the end there's also a mention of Sacco and Venzetti's impending execution that has me hopeful that the third book will involve many more anarchists. Also solve the mystery of whatever creepy swelling of magic is being brought forth by the man in the stovepipe hat, who I haven't mentioned yet in this review but he keeps popping up in the background, in paintings and in people's memories and dreams and things. Another mysterious motif that keeps popping up throughout the book is a logo of an eye with a lighting bolt under it. And a third ongoing motif is a bunch of dudes named after Founding Fathers who are apparently just driving around the country murdering young Diviners or people suspected of being Diviners. Look, it's really hard to fit all the cool stuff into a review because it's a really long book and it is just jam-packed with STUFF. Like, it could probably have been cut down at least 100 pages if you wanted to ruin Bray's descriptive style, but then it wouldn't be very Gothic, and it'd still be 500 pages long, and that's a lot of subplots and historical tidbits.

 

Anyway, it is almost October, and this is a good October book, so if you liked the first one I recommend the sequel highly, and if you haven't read the first one, that is a good October book too!