“Dream a Little Dream” is a translated title, originally written in German and then translated to English for its UK and US releases. I’ve always enjoyed reading translated titles. “100 Years of Solitude”. “The Last Dragon”. Something about seeing the way these books use language, the slightly different modes to the storytelling, the way characters interact and develop. All similar yet different enough to make the reading experience much more colorful.
And so it is with Kerstin Gier’s “Dream a Little Dream”. In many ways this book is standard YA fare. High school drama with being the new kid in school. Family drama with two families merging. A school gossip blog reporting on our main heroine. An initially obnoxious hottie for our heroine to obsess over. When the story involving the mystery and the dreams comes into play, though, is where the differences start to shine through. I won’t focus on them too much in the review, as I’d like you to have the pleasure of discovering them for yourself, but wanted to mention them as a plus for reading this book.
As a reading experience this book is a lot of fun. Although what we in America would consider the primary conflict (mystery involving dreams and magic) takes quite a long time to materialize. Long enough I almost wondered if I had misread the jacket copy at one point. Still, the book strikes an almost perfect balance between the everyday life stuff (whether the character will go to the winter formal or not, how merging the families will shake out etc.) and the mystery stuff.
You’ll notice I’m being intentionally vague about the mystery and dreaming magic, and that’s because discovering it is one of the great pleasures of this book. It materializes in a fashion that American readers aren’t used to and if I explain how it works I’m really afraid I’ll ruin it for you. Since I don’t want to spoil it, I’m not going to give you much to go on. You’ll have to read it and find out.
I’ll admit as the climax was approaching I started to get nervous this would be a book that wrote itself into a corner and couldn’t wrap up in the space it had left. My fears were put to rest when the ending delivered on almost every level. There were a couple things that irked me about it, but I suppose they had to end that way in order for the sequel to be a possibility.
All told, I rate “Dream a Little Dream” at four out of five stars for “I really liked it”.
