A Dream So Dark (2019)

The second book in the “Nightmare-Verse,” A Dream So Dark is an interesting follow-up to A Blade So Black. It builds on some of the great stuff from the first book while smoothing out some of the earlier wrinkles and expanding on the larger world of Wonderland and the Dreamwalkers. If it threw me for a loop to reach the end of A Blade So Black and realize it was the first installment in a trilogy, it was an even harder blow to finish this book and realize that the final book isn’t coming out until 2023! It’s gonna be a long wait. (Premise spoilers, which spoil the end of A Blade So Black.)

Dreamwalker Alice Kingston is drawn deeper into Wonderland’s rising conflicts, driven by the Black Knight who answers to a mysterious unnamed power in the land. Alice blames herself for the way things shook out in the last book, when she went up against the Black Knight and her close friend Chess paid a heavy price. Now, Chess is under the thrall of the the Black Knight’s ruler, and Alice is determined to make things right in any way she can.

This book manages to feel both tighter and more expansive than A Blade So Black, which is a neat trick. We get to see more regions of Wonderland and more of the beings there – the first book often features Wonderland more as a backdrop and a source of Nightmares than as a world where people live, and this book offers us a better look at the lives of everyday Wonderlandians. We meet a new Dreamwalker, along with a Wonderlandian guardian of a different Gate, and we learn a bit more about Wonderland’s lore, getting into more details about the war with the Black Queen and how that history plays into what’s happening in the present. But at the same time, we’re given a sharper focus, with the story feeling more closely-defined and culminating to a very specific conclusion. If A Blade So Black feels a bit like an exploration, A Dream So Dark is more of a journey.

Alice remains a terrific heroine. She carries the YA mantle of being more powerful/special than she knows, but the way she wrestles with that mostly avoids feeling trite or rote. Whie she’s confused, insecure, and guilt-ridden, she’s also a fighter who never gives up, prepared to leap into any situation to protect the people she cares about, no matter how dangerous. There’s some great material here for her, both during her adventure in Wonderland and back home in her relationship with her mom. It’s really cool to see her find the hero within herself, and I’m excited to see where the final book is going to take her.

Although I still love Alice’s perspective in the narration, I like that this book opens up the POV a little, giving us a number of chapters from Hatta’s perspective or the Black Knight’s. Narratively-speaking, the characters get split up a little more, so this is the best way to keep us up to speed on what’s happening in different areas of the story, but it also gives us more insight into these characters. Given Alice’s obvious fascination with Hatta, it’s good to see him as more of his own person, and after being intrigued by the Black Knight in the first book, he’s given space to really come into his own here. L.L. McKinney does a nice job of distinguishing between the three characters’ differing sensibilities in how she writes the chapters from their individual perspectives.

Warnings

Violence, language, sensuality, disturbing imagery, and strong thematic elements.

A Blade So Black (2018)

This book caught my eye – I’ve been trying to diversify my bookshelves, and I’m an easy sucker for a good deconstruction of classic literature – and I’m glad I picked it up. It offers up an engaging heroine and an imaginative incarnation of Wonderland tangled up in 21^st-century Atlanta.

Alice’s life changes the night her father dies, in more ways than one. Losing her father deprives her of a part of herself, but the same night, she also has her first encounter with Nightmares, monsters from the fantastical world of Wonderland who feed off of negative human emotion and cross over into our world. The encounter introduces her to Addison Hatta, an exiled Wonderlandian who identifies humans he can train to fight the nightmares. Before long, Alice is balancing school, home life, and interdimensional monster-hunting, and unsurprisingly, it’s hard for her to juggle all three. But when a mysterious figure emerges claiming to be a dark villain from Wonderland’s troubled past, she has no choice but to step up, and she embarks on a dangerous mission to save that world as well as her own.

There’s a lot to like about this book, chief among them probably being Alice herself. A heroine who’s flawed and unsure of herself but also determined, Alice revels in Wonderland’s incredible qualities even as she faces its monsters with trepidation. I love that she’s a huge fangirl (her and Kamala Khan, I tell you – teenage me would’ve loved these girls!), and I appreciate that portaling to another world without missing curfew presents serious challenges to her life. The first-person narration ranges from fun and snappy to vulnerably heartfelt; I’m glad to be in Alice’s head each step of the way.

Some of the Wonderland details are really neat. It’s been years since I read the Lewis Carroll books, so I’m sure there are some references I’m missing, but there’s plenty of fun easier inclusions for me to enjoy, like Addison and his Wonderland compatriot Maddie setting up shop on Earth at the Looking Glass pub filled with significant referential tchotchkes, or fellow monster hunters the Tweedladovs, nicknamed Dee and Dem. (Admittedly, some of the reference are a little too on the nose: Alice’s two cats are named Carol and Lewis?) I also like the vivid descriptions of the environments and flora in Wonderland, as well as the specifics of how magic works there. When you combine elements of Wonderland into our world, it gets really interesting, especially seeing how hard it can be for a Black girl from Atlanta to fight otherworldly monsters attracted to human fear, hatred, and anger – a major undercurrent running through the story is the recent police murder of a local teenage girl, and the Nightmare that grows specifically out of that community grief and upheaval presents a far greater challenge for Alice.

The novel is author L.L. McKinney’s first, and I’d say it feels like a first novel. There are points where the dialogue or the narration practically says, “And now here’s some exposition!”, so it can be unpolished in places, but the creativity of the piece, the fun banter, and the strong character work in Alice easily make up for it. (Also, I have to smile at the YA-ness of nearly every male character being a hot teenage boy, or in Addison’s case, hot immortal-ish Wonderlandian who has the appearance of a teenage boy.)

One more thing I need to mention: going into the book, I didn’t realize it was the first in a series, so I was not prepared for the ending. I’m happy I’ll have more opportunities to explore this world with Alice, and I wouldn’t say it’s not quite a Suzanne Collins/Hunger Games-style cliffhanger ending, but it definitely had me going, “Wait, no, but what happens next?”

Warnings

Violence, language, and strong thematic elements.