A Game of You, the fifth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman universe is an arc about a girl named Barbie - who made a brief cameo with her husband Ken in A Doll's House - and her current state of dreaming.

Unlike most of the other volumes, Morpheus does not play much of a role in this work. He shows up at the very beginning and the end, to take care of business in Barbie's dreamworld. The story also touches dramatically on identity, as many of the characters are struggling with it in their lives.

A Game of You is a thought provoking addition to the Sandman series and remains dark - and sad - even though it deviates from the horror that is characteristic of some of the earlier volumes. ( )

SPOILERS AHEAD!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I wrote myself a note last night to remind myself that the introduction to A Game of You really irritated me. I wish I had not. Though Samuel R. Delany did initially irritate me because he writes in his introduction to move on and finish the story before reading his thoughts (why on earth don't you put it at the end then!), when I did get back to his thoughts this morning, I found them to be really on point and fabulously written. Once again I find a short but extremely poignant bit of fantasy criticism at the beginning of a graphic novel! Delany writes, "the key to this particular fantasy world is precisely that it is a fantasy world where the natural forces, stated and unstated, whether of myth or of chance, enforce the dominant ideology." It seems like he is truly disparaging Gaiman's work until he says, "And it remains just a nasty fantasy unless, in our reading of it, we can find some irony, something that subverts it, something that resists that fantasy," and this is precisely what we find. Irony is definitely the dominant characteristic of A Game of You.

I was most struck by the idea that Barbie (yes, Barbie formerly married to Ken--yuck!) is our protagonist. I am one of those short, plump, annoying moms who really doesn't want her daughters to play with Barbie because she represents unnatural and unhealthy standards for beauty. They say that if she were alive, she would be seven feet tall with a whopping thirty-eight inch bust (haha---smaller than mine), but it towers over an eighteen inch waist (definitely smaller than mine). A "perfectly proportioned female" would have ten inches difference between bust, waist, and hips (34, 24, 34) supposedly. Barbie, on the other hand, would not be able to stand or walk; she'd fall over at the waist, weighed down not by her expansive intellect, but her crazy long blond hair. Obviously, she is an ideal role model for young children. But, for Gaiman, Barbie is actually only consistent with her childhood toy theme on the surface. The first panel in which she appears shows her half naked in bed, but we learn that she has an interesting group of friends. She is the sweet Barbie the doll makers want her to be, but she is also best friends with a transsexual, strangely insecure about her face (she's always drawing on it), and she is obviously repressed in many ways.

It's hard for me to write a sentence summary of what this story was really about because I'm not sure exactly what happened. Barbie's dreamworld was in trouble from the Cuckoo, but this trouble had something to do with Barbie and Rose Walker (see A Doll's House). I was initially frustrated that Barbie was the princess of her realm (don't we get enough of Barbie's awesomeness in the pink aisle of Toys R Us?) but it wore off as the subtle hints showed how powerless and ridiculous she was in that function. Her realm is icy cold, and she has nothing on but a ball gown. She is also at the mercy of her friends/subjects because she has no idea where she is going. After losing, or being betrayed by, all her friends, she is eventually taken to the Cuckoo who turns out to be.........I don't know. I still don't know and I finished the book. There were some really cool parts of this confrontation though. As Barbie approaches the Cuckoo's Citadel, she realizes that it's her old house in Florida. I have to admit that I was really afraid to find out who the Cuckoo was at this point; I have this idea for a book of my own. But I need not have worried, the Lacanian/Freudian psychoanalysis was really quite straight forward. At least in appearance alone, the Cuckoo was Barbie's younger self. I could go on about her public self versus her private self, but I am more interested in the type of analysis Delany did in his introduction than the individual psychoses of a character based off of a plastic goddess. There was some part of her that she repressed and that part took over her dreamworld. But, that's not all there is to it. The Cuckoo was also something outside of Barbie, something like an actual cuckoo...a possessing force or something. When Dream shows up at the end, he speaks of her "kind," but no one ever really says what her "kind" was. The same is true for Thessaly, who is apparently some sort of witch but we never find out which coven or clan she belonged to or anything.

I could spend a great deal of time talking about Wanda, Hazel, Foxglove, and Thessaly too, but I really wanted to mention how interesting Dream's reaction to the whole ordeal is at the end. I think there is something very attractive about Dream. He acts like a god. I know that sounds weird because we really don't have many references for what a god acts like except what we get from mythology and religion and he really doesn't act like any of those gods. He has his own sense of morality and it's so logical that it is hard to resist. Barbie wants him to punish the Cuckoo, but he seems to feel sorry for her. Dream offers her one "boon," but she obviously has to get herself and her friends home, so she can't recreate her dreamworld or anything. I need to think more about how to explain this, but Dream is just so calm and detached. I don't understand why what the Cuckoo has done is not evil, but what Thessaly, Hazel, and Foxglove have done is evil, and yet, I feel like if I asked Dream, he could explain it. Don't get me wrong, this isn't some religious fantasy. I don't feel safe because the world is in Dream's hands or anything. I just think he's cool and godlike. I like Death for a lot of the same reasons, but Death is really nice. I always look forward to her showing up because she's sweet to the other characters. You never really know if Dream is going to be nice or not. He wasn't very sympathetic to Barbie, but he doesn't lose his temper, and he's not mean really. I'm not doing a good job of this. The point is I think Dream is kinda attractive as an Endless...thingy. :)

Best part of this book was the sheer femininity of the whole thing. I really enjoyed one of the last scenes where Barbie tells Wanda what it was like to go into a comic book store. I've only ever been into a comic book store once, and the people there were super nice! But, I thought it was cute that the guys weren't nice to Barbie at all. They made fun of her breasts, and she said they must have taken "unhelpfulness lessons." It makes me wonder if I just got lucky. I would have been more nervous the first time, but I had my kids with me. Luckily though, if I need to go into a comic book store, I can take someone with me to show me the ropes. The really funny part was when Barbie told Wanda she wished she was there because Wanda would have said something to the guys. I have mixed feelings about this. It seems like it would be nice to have someone stick up for you when guys pick on you, but on the other hand, is it really worth it? What was hurt? Her pride. Besides, the guys in the comic book store probably wanted her. Immature way of showing though.

For a guy, Gaiman really does capture women pretty well. Barbie is fairly complex, as are Hazel and Foxglove. Thessaly is cool (weird and scary, but cool), but I don't think she's really human, so I don't think she counts. Gaiman seems like he would be a really cool person to talk to. Perhaps. ( )

A "skerry" is "a rugged, insulated sea-rock or stretch of rocks, covered by the sea at high water or in stormy weather; a reef."
The world of Dream is enormous and scattered with countless skerries, each one a setting for a thousand dreams. Morpheus is alerted that "One of the skerries is dying ..." His companion crow, Matthew, asks, "So what are you going to do about it, Boss?"
The Sandman responds, "Do about it? The Skerries are distant islets in the shoals of dream. They live, they die. They come and go. Why should I do anything about it?"
Here is a story for all the grown-up little girls who once played with Barbies. Meet a dream-world Barbie on a dying Skerry, accompanied by her gender-confused guardians. According to an oracle speaking from the face of a dead man, the Moon does not acknowledge cultural choices about gender. "Gender isn't something you can pick and choose as far as Gods are concerned."

Well, at long last - with A Game of You, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is finally starting to click for me. I found the first four volumes to be a mixed bag, but this fifth installment in the collected series really hit the mark. Even though much of the artwork remains substandard, Gaiman's invented mythology of The Land is what I had hoped for all along, namely to see the author throw off the shackles of a seemingly endless series of literary and mythological references and really let his own imagination run free. It certainly doesn't hurt that central character Dream is only peripherally involved in this extended narrative; five volumes into the series I can't really yet regard Dream as an interesting protagonist. Here's hoping A Game of You is just the start of great things - onto to volume six to find out... ( )

This is another fine novel from this author. It shows the complexity possible in a graphic novel. The intertwining of fantasy and reality. Not so subtle digs at contemporary culture (Barbie and Ken). As you read it you quickly realize that you can't tell which narration is "real". ( )