Review: Dream within a dream, perhaps?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 11, 2012
The tale is somewhat interestingly constructed. There's a fantasy world inside a fantasy world. The heroine, who lives in a fantasy setting as compared to our world, relates the things she sees and experiences into the fairy tales she has read and seen in her dreams."I've been having a pretty frightening dream lately," the main heroine says in the beginning of the book.How real are her dreams?The story, however, moves forward by adding more and more ingredients to the mix so one has to wonder - the dreams the heroine had, what do they represent, how are they essential to the story?Despite the sparsity of the wider world-building descriptions, the scene is plenty atmospheric - horse-driven carriages, cobblestones, kidnappings, men in iron masks, forts, etc. The peculiar twist, however, is how the settings are undoubtedly a fantasy, yet immediately relatable to our own world - things like asymmetric warfare, health and dental insurance can simply be mentioned in a casual conversation.The things start moving fast towards the ends of the book, leaving it with a somewhat abrupt cliffhanger. This is only the first part of the story so, one can see more of this world in the consecutive installments.