From Publishers Weekly
Debut novelist Dahlquist aims for a blockbuster with a mishmash of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Eyes Wide Shut that never quite comes together. Three months after 25-year-old Celeste Temple travels from "her island" (a Bermuda-like place) plantation home to Victorian London, fiancé Roger Bascombe breaks their engagement. Driven more by curiosity than desire, she follows him from his job at the foreign ministry to Harschmort House, where, with little prodding, she quickly finds herself in silk undergarments at a ritual involving masked guests and two-way mirrors. Making her escape, Miss Temple (as she's called throughout) kills a henchman. Ceremony organizers pursue her as she pursues their secrets. Poetry-quoting assassin Cardinal Chang and diplomat Dr. Abelard Svenson come to her aid. Chang tries to save a half-Chinese prostitute; Abelard tries to save a governess named Elöise; Miss Temple discovers she is not the woman she thought she was, nor Roger the man she hoped for. Meanwhile, through science and alchemy, evildoers capture erotic memories and personal will in blue crystals. Dahlquist introduces so many characters, props and plot twists, near-death experiences and narrow escapes that the novel has the feel of a frantic R-rated classic comic book—if comics were arch. ( )

OK, I like steampunk-y anachronistic murder mysteries with a supernatural leaning as much as the next guy (actually, probably quite a bit more, much to my boyfriend's derision), but come ON! There is no metaphor in the title here - they are ACTUAL glass books and people ACTUALLY eat dreams. The rest is a blur of silly costume parties and masqued balls where SOMETHING SINISTER IS GOING ON, usually involving half-clad ladies in a narcotic daze being subjected to the exploitative slaverings of outwardly respectable gentlemen. If you found the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut to be profound and philosophical, perhaps you are of a mind that can find some deeper meaning here. If not, and if it all just seems pretentious, empty-headed nonsense that far overreaches itself, come sit by me. ( )

An amazing book by any account. Long, complex, fantastic ideas etc. Just a bit to drawn out. The scope was nothing short of breathtaking, a whole victorian city created and imagined with aplomb. Great Characetres, paticularly liked Cardinal Chang. ( )

I plodded painfully through this doorstop novel, it has taken me months and months but finally I have finished it. At times I couldn't bear to pick it up, I almost quit 50 pages from the end and then again, 20 pages to go. By the end I didn't care about the book at all merely persevered to see if it was worth it . And was it? . . . no, not really.

There is a good story and an original setting here, but alas hidden somehere down beneath deep layers of description and endless details of what characters are saying, doing, eating, thinking, and then thinking about what someone else is saying, doing, eating, thinking.

I have never encountered such exasperating attention to detail before: I recall almost two pages of dense description of a character eating some bread and wine; And another drawn out scene relating Miss Temple dressing and then using the chamber pot and then wiping herself.

Irrelevant detail that ultimately slows down the action to the pace of a snail.

Excruciating. ( )

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is a promising fictional debut, but one that comes just shy of being able to keep its promises.

It follows three interesting characters whose personal intrigues lead them to become entangled in a political intrigue involving the cult of an alchemist painter who has invented a process for removing a person's memories---thereby making that person into an empty shell and thus a subservient slave---and putting those memories into special blue glass books which allows "readers" to experience the memories contained therein first-hand. An interesting concept, with interesting characters...but not *too* interesting.

The plot is a bit repetetive. The three protagonists go to the villains' headquarters independently, are captured, then escape. They meet up with each other, separate, each go back to the villains' headquarters, are captured...and so on. During each cycle, they all learn a bit more about what's going on, and then share their new piece of the puzzle with the others when they are reunited, but this pattern does grow a bit tedious by the end.

Everything about this novel is "not quite." The super-advanced, quasi-mystical technology of the villains *almost* works (in terms of the reader's suspension of disbelief), but not quite. The characters are likeable, but not quite loveable. Their stories are readable, but not compelling. The author's prose style is more than competent, but not quite artistic or beautiful.

Rather than slogging through the whole book, my advice is to just pick up the abridged version on CD from the library. Here's hoping that Gordon Dahlquist's second novel will be everything that this one could have been. ( )

The look and feel of the story fit well into the recent ongoing cinematic vogue for gothic Victoriana (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Prestige, Sherlock Holmes, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, etc.) but it's pretty badly written; if you really want the authentic edifice of syntactically complex Victorian prose, try Bulwer-Lytton, instead.I might give this another go, if ever I get back into striking a cane-sword wielding, becaped and laudanum-fuelled pose, but I somehow doubt it. ( )

I loved this book, and although I did think it was a little too long, and after reading some of the reviews here, I could understand why readers both loved, disliked or didn't even finish the book. It did take me a while to read the first chapter (but I was on holiday in Vegas at the time, so there were many other distractions!) as the text was quite small, and the author does go into alot of detail, describing the most mundane things.
However, I carried on through the next couple of chapters, immediately liking the Cardinal, and then when I got home off my holiday I really cracked on with it and couldn't put it down. Unlike others, I enjoyed the way that a chapter was dedicated to each character, and that when you found out what they had all been up to you could piece things together and fathom out why certain things had happened to each character, due to the actions of another.
As soon as I finished this book I investigated when the sequel, 'The Dark Volume', was released, and was in luck as it was being released within a couple of weeks. I immediately bought it (in hardback too, although more expensive, I had to have it!) and it took me just over a day to read.
I have since read the first (and second) book again, and enjoyed it just as much. When I was reading it for the first time, I couldn't help but imagine the book as a film and who would be in it, what the sets and costumes would be like, although due to the length and weaving of plots, I think the viewer would be quite confused.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book, it is 'my kind of book', although I do understand why others wouldn't like it. Like others, I bought the book due to the look of the cover and the intriguing title, and it is one of my most favourite impulse, Waterstones 3 for 2, buys! ( )

It took me about a day to get throught the first chapter, but by the third I was whizzing through about one an hour. Though it is confusing at the beginning as the three main characters know everyone by different aliases, once they are all together it is more understandable, though I think a second reading will make it clearer to me still.
The book starts with a mysterious masked ball which for different reasons is attended by the three main characters. Miss Temple is there following her ex-fiance,Cardinal is there as an assasin and Dr Svenson is there as part of the German prince's party.
As the book continues, they have to uncover the aims of a group of people have created a way of taking peoples memories and dreams and putting them into peices of glass.
There is plenty of mystery and intrigue and it is a very enjoyable book, as long as you don't give up straight away. ( )

A book which could have been so much better for a severe pruning at the editorial stage. Any interest I had in the tale was lost in the mire of words. ( )

in case you had not noticed, Harschmort is a house of masks and mirrors and lies, of unscrupulous, brutal advantage. We cannot afford illusion - about ourselves least of all, for this is what our enemies exploit most of all. I have seen notorious things, I promise you, and notorious things have been done to me.

A steampunk adventure in which three disparate people (a hired killer, a jilted woman, and a doctor whose job is to keep a dissolute prince out of trouble) come together to investigate a secret cabal. It was rather long and could easily have been edited to a more manageable length. In my opinion the reader doesn't really need to have the same time period covered in tortuous detail not once but three times (from the point of view of each of the protagonists). And just how many times did the baddies leave someone to kill one of the protagonists and assume they were dead, only to have them escape and pop up just as the baddies are gloating over their death? More times than your average James Bond movie, I reckon!

But I still enjoyed it, even though it took me well over a fortnight to slog my way through it. ( )

The three protagonists stumbles over a sinister conspiracy who wants to use a strange scientific method on humans in order to control them.

The first thing that grabbed my attention with this book was the cover (it's embarassing to admit I often judge books by their covers), which I really liked. I'm happy I picked it up though, because I really enjoyed it. It's a very dense book, and a lot of stuff happens in it but I never thought it got boring. I enjoyed most of the characters and felt they had interesting backstories and personalities. There is something about the author's view of sexuality that feels weird, but I can't pinpoint what it is. The book might have benefitted from more editing, but all in all I liked this book. ( )

If I were in a good mood, I would call this a sprawling behemoth of a novel. If I were not, I would refer to it as maundering tosh. In either case I can tell you for a fact that I got bored and skipped about 200 pages (as it's over 700 pages long, I'm still counting it as 'read', if only for the hours I'll never get back), and still managed to keep up with the plot. This is largely because it's written from three points of view, and any time the characters meet they are at pains to tell one another what's been happening in their particular story thread, usually in some detail. Somewhere within those 700 pages there is material for a halfway decent graphic novel. Elsewhere there is a heck of a lot of padding. Oh, and here and there some would-be erotic bits, apparently thrown in at random, and which have all the effect of a five-year-old saying 'fuck' at the dinner table. Yes, dear, very shocking, now put it away and finish your broccoli. ( )

Is Gordon Dahlquist actually Diana Gabaldon? GD/DG... clever really. I get a hint of Lord John and I know her fans would cry bloody murder if they knew she was writing this instead of working on the next Clare/Jamie Fraser book. If it is her it is a nice way to branch out... I don't know... it is just a little too familiar for me. I came across an Italo Calvino idea that reads:

"The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work. That a person puts his whole self into the work he is writing is something we often hear said, but it is never true. It is always only a projection of himself that an author calls into play while he is writing; it may be a projection of a real part of himself or the projection of a fictitious "I"--a mask, in short." The Uses of Literature

To me, the idea of the book- and some of its more clever twists- are better than the book itself. I think the story loses itself in trying to over-explain what is happening. Given the Calvino quote, I still think this is Diana Gabaldon writing this and the picture of Dahlquist is her in drag. I can see where she would have projected herself into that fictitious "Gordon" and created this story and background for him. A typically good author submersed in the GD persona could easily have a hard time meeting typical DG standards. ( )

If you like weird secret societies, this story will likely keep you until the end of the book. Some good characters (I liked Cardinal Chang) provide likeable, if unlikely, heroes. Erotic and esoteric technologies and experiments fascinate the senses and stimulate continued interest.

On the downside, the actual storytelling is a series of fight-encounter vignettes where X heroes meet up with Y secret society members, engage in a power struggle (verbal and/or physical) until some sort of intermediate result is accomplished, escape in some manner with enormous bodily injuries to one or more members on both sides, only to stumble into the next such vignette. There are probably hundreds. One of the book's locations, a superbly immense, rambling mansion called Harschmort (sp?), is the perfect metaphor for the book's structure. The architecture is put into place specifically for staging the series of encounters, with peep holes, connecting passages, and infinite serendipity enabling anything the author desires. The world of the book is sketchy and one wonders if the characters we know are the only humans on earth. This would explain how they all seem to find one another at just the right time (good or bad).

Especially unforgivable: the name "Celestial Temple" and the use of "Abelard" and "Eloise" together as a would-be couple. Where is the editor's hand? ( )

The plot is afoot and the sinister villains, who seem numberless, and who all have long, unpronounceable names, are out to corrupt everyone and rule the world. Our three heros (well, one is a heroine) ally themselves against the forces of evil for reasons that are never made completely clear (as is true of so much in this book) and, through an unbelievable and seemingly endless series of derring do rescues, hairsbreadth escapes, breaking and entering, spying through peepholes, wandering aimlessly around the manse, and generally getting beat up, mauled and seduced, they wend their way to the denouement of this story. This might have been a better book if it had been about 300 pages shorter (750 pages is a lot of derring do, especially when it sometimes seems to be set on automatic replay) and if the author had taken time to think through the logic of some of the situations. I won't be reading the sequel. ( )

Really enjoyed this book, even though it was over long and lost it's way at times. ( )

Decent read. I did like that the vocabulary is not written for a 5 year old. I am so tired of that. Interesting story and plot. ( )

Reads like a Jules Verne novel. ( )

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is a Victorian-esque penny-dreadful all the way. Our main characters are Miss Temple, an independently wealthy young woman just jilted and looking for adventure; Cardinal Chang, the neither religious nor Chinese thug-for-hire opium addict representing the seedier side of the city; and Doctor Svenson, an acclaimed doctor-turned-diplomat with the thankless job of keeping an eye on a dissolute Germanic prince before his upcoming nuptials to a leading industrialist's daughter. These three unlikely allies stumble across each other as they investigate a mysterious cabal, bent on using an alchemical 'process' to control the minds and actions of those less fortunate - and how else would such domination be shown in a Victorian-era penny-dreadful but sex?

The entire novel is a series of breaking and enterings, abductions, fist- and knifefights, narrow escapes and various conspirators on both sides inexplicably allowing their nemeses to live rather than simply shooting or stabbing them and having done with it. And that very implausibility is a part of the novel's charm. All told, I think this probably works better in the serial format in which it was originally published. As it is, the chapters seem too long, the episodes quite similar, and the actual explanations as to what is going on during the 'process' too sketchy. And each of them ends on a doozy of a cliff-hanger, which made it difficult to find a good breaking-off point at night or on the tube...

Despite these faults, Dahlquist certainly knows how to keep the pages turning, and more importantly, I really came to care about the characters (though less so for Miss Temple as she seemed to require an awful lot of rescuing). I wanted them to miraculously escape, thwart the cabal, and live happily ever after, and I was willing to put up with a lot of James Bond plot-twists to get there. And given the cliffhanger of an ending, I'm also going to be picking up the next book in the series to see how Cardinal Chang and co. are faring... ( )

Great premise, good atmosphere, and some really original, startling scenes, but the whole doesn't seem to cohere. Might have worked better as a series of short stories (seems to have worked well as a serial.) Shame, really, but it is his first book, after all. I'll be keeping an eye out for more. ( )

Glass Books of the Dream Eaters was good but far too long for what it was. It's exciting stuff, with good characters, adventure, conspiracies, violence and a good helping of smuttiness, but it really needs to lose a couple of hundred pages.

The cover quotes compare it to the works of H. Ryder Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. These authors, I note, wrote considerably shorter books! ( )

I'm generally a very patient reader and am likely to enjoy whatever story I read, regardless of literary merit. But this book just stretched my patience to its limit!

The first quarter of the book was engaging enough. The pace was good and I was excited to find out more. But, as I entered into the 2nd quarter of the story, the plot just kept dragging more and more.

The characters became annoying and their adventures frustrating.

But I hung on, thinking there must be a big pay-off in the end.

When I finally reached the last quarter I stopped caring about the details of the plot, and I was just skimming through the pages, watching out for plot points.

And then, I gave up even doing that.

I can't objectively say that the plot was bad, since I didn't read all of it.

All I can say is, I lost interest. It was a good beginning though. And an interesting premise. Too bad it didn't hold up. ( )

This was produced as instalments as well as being produced as a full book and I'm not certain that it wouldn't have been a better experience. It's an interesting story of conspiracy, steampunk, control and strange going-ons in a place that sounds like London but isn't.

I found it interesting but somewhat flawed, it had shining moments but it also had moments that lagged and made me wonder if I should continue. Still it kept my attention and made me postpone sleep to find out how it finished. ( )

This is one of the weirdest books I have ever read. I'm not sure that I actually like it, or that 'enjoy' would be a true description of how one feels when reading it. 'Disturbed' would be better! ( )

first line: "From her arrival at the docks to the appearance of Roger's letter, written on crisp Ministry paper and signed with his full name, on her maid's silver tray at breakfast, three months had passed."

Really engaging, but frustrating at times. I got really annoyed with how the characters -- heroes and villains alike -- keep leaving their enemies alive. This isn't done out of any moral aversion to killing, since both sides do enough of that; rather, it seems the author is just stumbling to pace each revelation and forward his plot.

I wish this weren't Dahlquist's his first novel, because a little more experience would have helped make this spectacular, rather than just really good...and it is really good. The setting is a sort of alternate-universe version of 19th-century Britain. (Everything's just a little off; it feels like it could be one of the alternate worlds in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.)

The focus shifts among the three protagonists: the first chapter follows the adventures of the heroine; the next focuses on the simultaneous adventures of a hero; the third on the other hero; the fourth brings them together; and the cycle repeats. And the whole thing works. Dahlquist is a playwright, which makes me wonder whether he imagined his story as an elaborate drama, with actions taking place simultaneously in separate sections of a stage. ( )