A review by the_book_tale
Dream State by Martin Ott

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

1.0

Thank you to the author for the ARC copy. 

I felt very conflicted reviewing Dream State. I don’t like leaving negative reviews on books that have very few rating and were written by an author that isn’t well known , because I don’t want to be responsible for someone choosing to not read the book. In this case however, I feel that it is right to leave a review, because my issue with the book do not stem from personal taste, but from fundamental flaws in the writing. 

To begin I would like to discuss the sexist undertones throughout the novel. It felt as though no women in the book ever had thoughts about anything other than men. All of their words, actions, and inner monologues all centered around men. This really turned me off as women’s lives are actually not centered around men and we do actually have thoughts that aren’t about men. To show that this isn’t all my head I would like to quote some lines from the book:

“How did a women with a porn star’s name and a capitalist’s heart end up with her in the same boat, nipples pointing at the invisible broken moon?”

“Heidi unhooked her bathing suit top and began to tie off his wrist with a tourniquet.”

“Her anger only deepened when she spotted Maxine, the stranger in their midst, leaning suggestively against the counter waiting for water to boil, arms crossed beneath her breasts.”

“Women knew their own power. He was certain Stacy was flirting with the new head honcho. Gibraltar shot Kara a what are you going to do about this look and seemed to be enjoying the attention.”

As you can probably tell from the passages, there is also a lot of women on women hate — and pretty much all of it stemmed from jealousy due to being with/ flirting with men 🫠. Women’s lives do not, in fact, revolve completely around men, surprisingly enough. 

I could talk about the sexist undertones and my issues with the women in the book for a lengthy amount of time so I am simply going to move on.

My second issue was the amount of characters. In a long novel it is possible to have 30 characters that are developed enough for the reader to know who they are. In a 180 page novel it is not. There were only around 7 characters that I could actually keep track of. New characters or people who had been mentioned in passing once kept popping up and I had no idea who they were and what they were doing. It made the book very confusing.

My third issue was the rational behind everyone being unable to sleep. The moon was hit by space debris or a meteor. This would definitely mess up the earth, but it wouldn’t stop everyone from sleeping. I researched online, and if the moon disappeared completely they length of days would shorten. I’m sure this would mess with peoples sleep schedule, but it wouldn’t stop them from sleeping altogether. In the book the moon didn’t even disappear completely. I brushed this aside with the thought they probably couldn’t sleep due to some supernatural reason. All of the characters also started to lose their minds after not sleeping for 1 or 2 days. Except at the end all of the characters were suddenly able to sleep because they adjusted to the new orbit? This confused me greatly. 

I don’t really have anything to say about the writing in general. It was not my personal cup of tea as it was extremely fast paced and was not overly descriptive, but I know some people enjoy writing like that. 

If you read this long review thank you for listening to my opinions. Of course this is subjective to me, but many of the issues in the book I could not get past no matter how hard I tried, especially the issues with the women.

This is the info I found about the effect missing the moon would have if you are interested:

“This means that the earth would not slow, which then means that the hours of our days would change. Suddenly, without the moon, our days would last between 6 and 12 hours, rather than the 24 hours we experience now. If our days became this short, then we would have significantly more days in our calendar year. Instead of 365 days in a year, we would have over a thousand… Scientists suggest that without the moon, tides would be 1/3 of the size they are now. High tides would be much smaller than they are now, and low tides would be even lower.”

“Earth’s oceans would have much smaller tides - about one-third the size of what they are now. Tides churn up material in the oceans, which allows coastal ecosystems to thrive. Animals in these environments – crabs, mussels, starfish, snails – rely on the tides for survival… Additionally, tidal movements help stabilise Earth’s climate. Ocean currents are driven by the tides, which distribute warmer water around the globe and influences the global climate. Temperatures could potentially be more extreme on the Earth without this influence… A missing Moon could cause a lot of confusion for animals all over the world. Predators rely on both the darkness of night and a small amount of moonlight to effectively hunt. Without any light at night, prey would likely thrive because predators would have a harder time spotting them. Just like the tides, this could cause a drastic change in ecosystem, and potentially lead to the extinction of certain predatory animals.”