Summer '17 Book 2

Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

The very first year I participated in my school's TAYSHAS contest, I read the book The Diviners. This is the second in the series.

This picks up with Evie, who is on the outs with her uncle Will because she came out as a diviner, but, because she is a diviner, has a popular radio show. Henry and Theta still live together. She's one of the Ziegfeld girls, and he's a pianist. Jericho still has a thing for Evie, and Mabel still has a thing for Jericho. Sam is still Sam. Just when you think things are going ok for our group of friends, we find out just how wrong we are.

Now there is a thing called the sleeping sickness, where people fall asleep, but never wake up. As it starts in New York's Chinatown, the general populace believes it is a foreigner's disease. This leads to more ethnic division, but also introduces us to a new character, Ling Chan. Ling is half Chinese, half Irish, and like Henry, she can walk in dreams. As you may expect, Henry and Ling team up to try to find the cause to the sleeping sickness.

Also, the museum that Evie's uncle runs is in financial trouble. Unfortunately, he ups and leaves on a mission, and it is now left to Sam and Jericho to try to raise funds to save the museum. They enlist the help of Evie, the Sweetheart Seer, to help them.

One thing that bothered me (and wasn't really resolved) was that people kept mentioning a man in their dreams with a stovetop hat. This reminded me of the villain in the first book, which leads me to believe that everything is connected. Maybe this will be resolved in the third book. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until October to find out.

I can see how the length of this might be off putting. It's a little over six hundred pages. I read nearly half of it on a flight from Houston to New York City, so it is a quick read, despite the number of pages. Really great book.