Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist

Category: Fiction Grade: A

This novel is pretty hard to categorize, but I'll try. Take 4 parts historical fiction, 3 parts spy/action fiction, 2 parts science fiction and 1 part (or maybe half a part) of romance novel, mix them together and you'll this terrific first book by Gordon Dahlquist. Its definitely one of the more original plot lines I've read in quite a while.

I'm not going to say a whole lot about the story since half the fun of the book is slowly figuring out what's going on. It takes place in Victorian England. The fact that there are trains but no cars, slots in to the late 19th century. The three stars of the book are a recently jilted young woman, a German court doctor to a visiting prince and a street tough for hire. They independently stumble on a strange plot that has something to do with the minerals found on the woman's former fiance's estate that is processed in to a beautiful blue glass with strange attributes. Without giving away too much, I can tell you that the breakup of the woman's engagement, the doctor's loss of his prince and the street toughs most recent job all have to do with events that surround the blue glass.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll remember a book from last summer called The Stolen Child. If you picked that one up and liked it, give this a try. It's likely to appeal to the same reader. For most of the book, the fantasy/science fiction is pretty subtle so you don't have to be a Tolkien fan to like this.

One quick comment on the mechanics of the author put this book together. There are a lot of books out there where, apparently, the author assumed that the reader would devote his life to reading from the time he picked up the book until the time he puts it down. Long chapters; no intra-chapter breaks -- i.e. no logical place to stop when its time to turn out the light. Dahlquist gets it right here -- the book is broken in to bite sized pieces. Chapters tend to run long but, there's a defined stopping point every couple of pages. Wish more authors would do this.