Reviews

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

lotte_898's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

lilsslil's review against another edition

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

reuben___'s review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

 This may be my favourite piece of contemporary fiction I’ve read this year so far. The world that Rankin-Gee creates is so real, tactile, and visceral, it feels as though you could reach out and touch it. 

Beautiful and heartbreaking, Dreamland transports its readers to the slow and violent end of the world. Here, austerity never ends, it transforms into an even more vicious and murderous regime. We watch this unfold slowly and suddenly through the eyes of Chance, the story’s narrator. 

Chance begins the story as a child, in a world that looks much like ours now. Her mother and brother are convinced to move out of London by a new housing scheme, where council house tenants are paid to leave the city. Their mother chooses Margate, where she lived as an art student, and was happy. Which is how they end up in the seaside town as England begins to fall into the sea and overheat.

This story is littered with love and violence, it is beautiful and terrible and deeply moving  as we follow the lives of a community condemned to face the end of the world, but determined to live.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Suicide, and Murder

ewzg's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

littlelynn's review

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I live near Margate, I know these places, I've walked on these streets, and that made this book harrowing and real in a way that was genuinely unsettling and beautiful in a myriad of different ways. I understand how you can describe Dreamland as an absolute derelict shit-heap and yet also wonderful in its own way. 

The book is bleak and beautiful. Chance's name is endlessly ironic. The situation is lives in and the people around her are entirely real and fully realised - there are characters that I hate, but I understand exactly what made them the way they are, no one exists just to create drama, they exist because they would and do exist. 

Some things are left unanswered, unresolved, and ambiguous, but it works for the novel. I don't need to know, I need to not know, to be able to understand what Chance is thinking and why she makes the choices that she makes. 

I've seen a few reviews complaining about the glacial pace and lack of plot, but I wonder if that is a misunderstanding of genre. This book is a dystopia yes, but first and foremost, it is literary fiction, and an excellent piece of it at that. Literary fiction is almost always slow and light on plot, it is almost always more of an exploration of human nature than an adventuresome 'lets-topple-the-corrupt-government story. It is a dystopia in the same way Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is one. 

georgie_rose_'s review

challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.5

tamisiobhan's review against another edition

3.0

The dystopian genre is still relatively new to me. I believe I’m still getting my head around some of the concepts from what I’m reading. Unfortunately, I did find this one slow-paced for me only able to read so much at a time. However, that being said, I did enjoy the concept of the book and the way it was written, narrated by the character Chance. I found that this concept is realistic. I’m unsure of the place in time this was supposed to be set but I feel that it could start tomorrow. There were twists that I didn’t see coming which made reading somewhat intriguing for me. Although I didn’t 100% love this book, I’m interested in the other works by the author.

music_mentalist's review

4.0

An interesting read - I like the writing style. An open ending often leaves me a bit unfulfilled but it was fine here. 

rosebache's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

esme_92's review

emotional sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5