Unfortunate cover… I mean, I think it’s beautiful, but it does not match the tone of the story at all!

I was all over the place with this one. I thought it was 3 stars, 4 stars, and 5 stars all at different points. I’m going with a 3.5 rounded up because I did really enjoy the themes, the imagination of it, and even the bleakness.

This is the story of Abernathy, a young man with huge debts, and the job he takes out of desperation - removing all the “bad” things from workers’ dreams. It’s worse than it seems, of course, and gets out of hand. Another major part of the story is Abernathy’s relationship with Rhoda, a woman he wants to help but doesn’t know how.

There’s initially a lot of humor in this, and I wasn’t sure it would be for me. But it turns dark, and I found myself pretty invested in Abernathy, Kai, and Rhoda a little ways in.

I really enjoyed all of the commentary on capitalism, but it is depressing and Abernathy’s naïveté is rough to watch.

As I got to the middle, I started to get bored, and I found the story to be too repetitive. Rhoda’s situation felt cliche, which isn’t always a bad thing, her situation does exist in reality. But it didn’t always manage to expand beyond cliche, so her story wasn’t super successful for me.

I also felt as dumb as Abernathy many times, but I feel like I was supposed to see more clearly than he did