“Nobody likes a scheming woman, a calculating one. A diva. I’d have to be the girl next door, blissfully ignorant of my place in the world, its proximity to greatness. As if I’d spent my whole life unaware that my destiny could walk into my life one day and place me gently where I belong.” Dreamland by Olivie Blake.
This review took time. Not because I didn’t have anything to say but rather that I had A LOT to say and I had no idea how to pull all my thoughts together in a way that made any sense.
I finished Dreamland by Olivie Blake and immediately had about fifty thoughts, all of them contradicting each other, and somehow I think that’s exactly what Olivie Blake intended…
As my neighborhood librarian, I’m usually always out with a book. So, with Dreamland I was praying no one asked me what the book was about while simultaneously dying for someone to ask me what it was about. I only took it outside to read one time…
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Summary: Dreamland by Olivie Blake
So, what is Dreamland? (Trying to explain the plot without sounding like I’ve lost the plot myself…)
At its simplest, it’s about Anya, an aspiring actress trying to make it in Hollywood, who gets pulled into the strange and increasingly disturbing world of the wealthy de Witt family.
There’s a mysterious house, with even more mysterious people, beautiful people as well, women murder on hot nights, occult rituals, a lot of obsession, and even more questioning what is actually real. It’s a gothic horror meets Hollywood fever dream with a dash of psychological mind-bender.
Review: Dreamland by Olivie Blake
So, Dreamland by Olivie Blake is strange. It’s beautiful and grotesque, dreamlike (nightmare?) and unsettling, full of Hollywood glamour, murder, occultism, obsession, confusion, and the perfect kind of dark atmosphere.
And for most of the book, I kept trying to figure out what was actually happening. Was the ritual real? Was there really something supernatural at work? Who is actually who? Who can we trust? Why are women being killed every time the weather gets hot?
By the end, I started wondering if I was asking the wrong questions and started thinking maybe Anya’s real ritual wasn’t supernatural at all and it was actually the creation of her new identity.
HEAR ME OUT!
Anya spends so much of the book thinking about the roles women are expected to play. She describes the characters she’s written for herself: “The good girl, the moral girl, the logical girl. The girl who saw the devil coming and sensibly turned away.”
But then she actually meets the devil… and she doesn’t turn away.
Anya tells us that she would have to be “the girl next door, blissfully ignorant” and I kept thinking about that after finishing the book. Anya isn’t blissfully ignorant at all. She knows exactly what she wants, and how ambition can look on a woman. So she learns to perfectly play the part and performs innocence while moving closer and closer to her dream.
SPOILER!
Eventually, she gets her dream. And that is what makes the ending so fascinating to me…
I don’t think we’re meant to know with absolute 100% certainty if Anya truly participates in some supernatural ritual, or whether the ritual is simply another story people have created to explain all the terrible things happening. The book itself keeps poking holes in its own mythology, like if the ritual isn’t real, then who decided what its rules were in the first place?
“Love–if it is really love–can justify all things. You taught me that. Even bloodshed. Even inhumanity. Even betrayal. Love may be cruel, but it is always fair and righteous, or is must be. Isn’t it? Because if it isn’t, then how certainly we are damned.”
Dreamland by Olivie Blake
This quote feels like one of the book’s central questions: what are we willing to sacrifice for the thing we believe is worth having? And no, Dreamland does not give us an easy, clear answer. HA! Why would it…
Anya wants fame, the de Witts family want immortality, and Jude wants his freedom. Everyone is reaching toward some version of a dream, and everyone has their own justification for what they’re willing to do to get there, right?
Even the setting feels like part of that dream. Hollywood is where dreams are made, but the book keeps showing us what happens behind closed doors. Beauty and horror cannot exist without the other.
So, Anya turns her nightmare into a story and gets the dream she’s always wanted.
Which leaves me with the question I will never get an answer to: did Anya survive the ritual, or did she learn how to perform it to get what she wants?
Final Thoughts: Dreamland by Olivie Blake
In the end, maybe all I am doing is taking all this horrifying and confusing information and desperately trying turning it into a story that makes sense to me.
Maybe that’s the point… or maybe it’s not at all! Maybe there isn’t one neat explanation and there is never supposed to be.
Regardless, I enjoyed the ride. The strange, gruesome, unsettling, horror-laced confusion that is Dreamland by Olivie Blake. I’m not sure I ever made it out of this nightmare…
⭐⭐⭐ Thank you Tor Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC!
