The Circus of Stolen Dreams (Lorelei Savaryn)

The Circus of Stolen Dreams
Lorelei Savaryn
Viking
Fiction, MG Chiller/Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Three years ago, Andrea's kid brother Francis disappeared in the middle of the night... and it's all her fault. Not a day passes when she doesn't blame herself, though she still hopes against hope that he'll return. One night, at yet another tense family dinner, her divorced parents announce that they're going to finally get rid of Francis's things, insisting it's time to let go... but she can't let go. That's as bad as pretending he never existed at all.
Grieving, angry, she jumps on her bike and pedals off into the moonlit evening to cool down, taking the path through the woods at the park - and finding something very strange. A flyer leads her to the circus Reverie, a place where children from around the world can forget their worries for a single night. The price of entry for one night is a dream or memory - and she knows just the memory she'd love to be rid of, the memory of her last night with Francis and the terrible mistake she made that led to him vanishing.
Once inside the iron gates, Andrea finds herself swept up in a magical world, where she can live countless dreams and memories and nightmares, everything from flying through the clouds to escaping a sea witch sacrifice. But when she finds a nightmare that used to plague her brother, she realizes that he must have come to Reverie after he vanished from their room. Maybe he's still there, one of the countless other children wandering the fairgrounds. With her new friend Penny, she sets out to uncover the truth - and instead discovers a darkness at the heart of the circus, beneath the whimsy and wonder... a darkness that nobody can escape.

REVIEW: Sinister circuses aren't exactly new fictional territory, but The Circus of Stolen Dreams adds a bit of a twist with the dream angle, helped by a main character who genuinely has reasons to want to abandon her pain- and guilt-filled reality to bury herself in another world... and a villain with a vested interest in keeping her there.
From the start, Andrea is a girl whose life has been shattered beyond any hope of repair: she's sitting at a silent dinner table with her divorced parents, staring at the empty seat where her brother Francis should be, crushed by her own guilt (which the reader will understand later on)... only to be told that her mother is about to get rid of the last of her brother's belongings, one more blow she simply cannot take. Her ride in the dark - ostensibly to clear her head, but one wonders whether she intends to really go back home to deal with the thorny emotions lingering there - brings her to the circus Reverie and a strange girl, roughly her own age, who explains the rules and the price of admission. At twelve, Andrea is still young enough to accept magic - especially when facing a circus in the park that could not possibly be where it is - if old enough to hesitate, if slightly. She agrees, of course, at least as much to be rid of the painful memory of her guilt as to gain entrance to a fairground full of literal dreams. Once inside, she encounters Penny, and her first possible hints that something might be amiss; Penny, like everyone else, appears happy, but has the appearance of someone who's been up far past their bedtime. There are also some oddly anachronistic outfits floating among the other guests. But Andrea is too relieved to finally be in a place where she can enjoy herself, where she can set down the burden of her parents' divorce and her estrangement from her own friends and... something else that was bothering her, something she knew must be bad if she agreed to give up its memory to get into Reverie. While the dreams (and even a sampling of nightmares, which provide their own exhilaration in the way a haunted house or wild roller coast does, the adrenaline rush of surviving and escaping) help, Andrea can't shake the nagging sense that she's forgetting something very important... and when she finds Francis's recurring nightmare among the tents, enough comes flooding back to prompt her to ask questions and poke around, even though Penny warns her against it. This brings her into the presence of the Sandman, the creator and operator of Reverie, and the beginning of a high stakes game of sorts between the two, as he tries to coax her back into complacency and forgetfulness and she refuses to give in - with increasingly dire consequences, as it becomes harder and harder to tell just what is dream and what is reality in this place. Even when she finds a little boy who seems to be Francis, he's a child of six, not of nine like the real boy would be - or does time even work the same here in Reverie? As Andrea digs for the truth about the circus and Francis and a means to escape, she finds ways to process the grief that's been strangling her for over three years, an emotional and sometimes heartbreaking journey.
The tale came close to earning an extra half-star for delving surprisingly deep into the pain of a broken child and family and how attempts to ignore reality and the truth inevitably produce backlash that causes at least as much pain as the thing one was trying to ignore in the first place - not just for oneself, but for those around you, even total strangers caught in the maelstrom of consequences - and setting up parallels between Andrea and the Sandman that make it plausibly difficult for the girl to outwit and outmaneuver him. I kept thinking the tale had reached its peak, and it just kept going higher and hitting harder. After the emotional climax, the final parts feel just a little too stretched, though, with a couple things that, though tangential, stretched the premise a little far (even given the presence of magic)... things that almost make me wonder if Savaryn was intending a sequel or series involving Andrea and/or Reverie. It was a very, very near miss, though. I wasn't anticipating a tale as emotionally charged as this one, as willing to confront head-on concepts of grief and loss and guilt and the yearning to escape it all, capturing along the way the immersive, strange wonders of dreams.
(As a closing nitpicky note, I call foul on the concept of not feeling pain in dreams. Personal experience suggests otherwise.)

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