Elizabeth Knox (1) (1959–)

I'd forgotten the details of how this ended, so I was gripped and delighted and thoroughly satisfied all over again. These books are just beautifully deep - in ideas and in the elegance and details of the prose - in a way that leaves me replete where more quick-march action-slick stories still leave me hungry.

It's a story about the power of dreams, perhaps. Or it's a story about golems. Or it's a story about how, when you pull on a thread, you cannot possibly know how much fabric you might show more unravel. It's about the destructiveness of desperation, and the casual brutality that causes desperation. It's about the real opiates of the masses. It's about noticing the injustices in the margins.

It's all of that, and it's dressed in lovely 19th-century charm, and I love it to bits. show less

The search for a box and the mysterious book within crosses over from our world, to Sidhe, to Purgatory, pursued by stalkers and demons and terrible spells. Epic, but also profoundly thoughtful and subtle, with a truly gruelling and suspenseful middle, but a surprising ending that's wonderfully why-the-hell-not life-affirming and hopeful.

Elizabeth Knox returns to the world of Southland (a sort of alternative New Zealand) in this second installment of her Dreamhunter Duet, and the result is a fantasy that is every bit as complex, thought-provoking, and emotionally satisfying as the first. Picking up a little before the conclusion of the previous book, Dreamhunter, and running through the same sequence of events, but from Rose and Grace Tiebold's perspective, rather than Laura's, Dreamquake soon had me as engrossed as the show more first book - involved with the characters emotionally, eager to know more about The Place, the nature of dream-hunting, and Cas Doran's plot to control the political life of Southland, and curious to see how the relationship between Laura and her sandman, Nown, would progress.

I was incredibly impressed with the way that Knox answered these questions, without really answering them. Yes, the reader discovers what the Place is (well, more how it was made, than what it truly is), and what the dreams that the Dreamhunters mine in it, are meant to be and do. And yes, we see a lot more of Cas Doran, and learn about his sinister plot to seize political control, and be a behind-the-scenes puppet-master. We see more of Nown (and more Nowns, as it happens), and gain a deeper appreciation of his character. But although there is an overt explanation offered for these questions, although we learn more, the answers to the deeper questions remain elusive. What is a Nown, exactly? A sandman? A soul, as Laura claims? Where does the divine come into all of this, and how is it that some characters seems more on the divine end of the humanity-divinity spectrum, than others? These sorts of questions - the questions that make this a series really worth reading - are never really answered, and that's as it should be, because they're not the sort of questions that have answers. I imagine that some readers - particularly Americans, who (in my experience) are used to narratives in which the divine and its role is definitely defined, either for the good or the bad - will find that incredibly uncomfortable. For my part, I loved it!

I read Dreamquake and its predecessor Dreamhunter for the International Children's Book Club to which I belong, in which we choose selections from all over the world. These books are meant to represent New Zealand, in our reading schedule, and I have to say, having now finished both of them, that they feel very much like products of that country to me. It's not just the topographical and climatic details (the island nation, Christmas in the summer), but the progressive "feeling" to them. Themes of sexuality (Laura's sexual awakening! sex inside The Place!), and of political and economic injustice, are freely depicted, while religious and theological ideas are explored in an unselfconscious way. I was strongly reminded of another brilliant work of New Zealand children's literature, Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters (admittedly one of my favorite YA novels ever!), in which another young girl is visited by a person/persons from another time/world - persons drawn into the world (like Nown was by Laura) by the girl in question, and intended, in some ways, to give her a warning. These parallels emphasized, for me, that this was a book coming out of a particular tradition, and while I can't say I am fluent with all the themes and subjects of that tradition, that sense of it as part of a larger literary "conversation" gave it great added meaning for me.

In short: Dreamquake, which I feel really must be read together with its predecessor, Dreamhunter, is an immensely engaging, intelligent, thought-provoking work of fantasy, and is one I highly recommend to those readers who enjoy the genre, and are looking for something a little different. show less

On the island nation of Southland - a sort of alternative New Zealand settled by immigrants from both Britain and the Aegean island of Elprus - a strange phenomenon had been discovered. "The Place," as it was known, was an alternate dimension, existing alongside the everyday one in the Rifleman Mountains, and accessible only to a few. A strange, dusty world, constantly illuminated by a diffuse light, it was a source of incredible dreams - dreams that could be harvested by those known as show more Dreamhunters, brought out into the larger world of Southland, and transmitted to others. And so an industry was born, as dream parlors and dream palaces flourished, and an entire infrastructure developed - all regulated by the Intangible Resources Act, and enforced by the Dream Regulatory Body.

In 1906, some twenty years after the discovery of The Place by a violinist named Tziga Hame, whose family came from Elprus, and were reputedly descended from Lazarus (ie, Lazarus of Bethany), Dreamhunter opens, following the story of the extended Hame/Tiebold family, and focusing on two young women: Laura Hame, daughter of the famed Tziga, and her cousin Rose Tiebold, daughter of another famed Dreamhunter, Grace Tiebold. As the girls prepare for their Try - in which they test whether they can enter The Place, and possibly become Dreamhunters themselves - their world is shaken by a series of tragic and terrifying events. Tziga, under contract to the Department of Corrections to supply "Think Again Dreams" for prisoner rehabilitation, disappears; only one of the cousins (despite their strong expectations otherwise) is able to enter the place; and a sinister conspiracy, one involving the use of dreams and Dreamhunters to influence the political life of the nation, emerges. As each member of this close-knit family struggles with larger issues, they must also contend with the changing nature of their familial bonds, and their relationships with one another.

Thought-provoking, original, and - in the end - deeply moving, Dreamhunter is a book I would recommend to readers who enjoy fantasy with a little philosophical heft. So many fascinating questions are raised, in the course of the story, from the nature of dreams themselves, to the proper response to state misconduct. I appreciated the fact that Knox does not always depict her characters as knowing the correct (or any) answers to these questions, or following the correct path. In fact, the entire final sequence, in which Laura commits an act of mass brutality and dream terrorism, at the behest of her missing father, points to the fact that these characters are anything but generic cookie-cutter cut-outs, firmly in either the "good guy" or "bad guy" camp. On the contrary, Knox's characters, from the Hames and Tiebolds, to figures like Mamie and Cas Doran, are complex and true-to-life, and witnessing their interaction with one another, the ways that they negotiate their ever-changing relationships, is one of the great joys of the story.

I thought Knox brilliantly captured the surreal quality of dreams, and the dream-world in this first entry in her Dreamhunter Duet. In fact, she captured that feeling almost too well, something that created a sense, not of being repelled, in the course of my reading, but of being slowed (sometimes almost to a crawl). I found it difficult to read as quickly as I would have, if this had been any other book, as I needed to savor, and to think about what I was reading. I found that I simply couldn't race through it, as I've done with so many other, more plot-centric stories, but really had to think about what Knox was depicting. I found her use of the Lazarus character, and of the golem-like Nown, immensely fascinating, as it raised additional questions about the nature of creation, and of the (porous) division between humanity and divinity: What does it mean, to create a being? What obligations do the creator and created have, to one another?

It is this last - the questions raised by the creation of the sandman Nown (and what an inspired thing, that he is a sandman, when one considers that this is also a tale about dreaming) - that really makes the story stand out to me, from an emotional perspective. I found the exchanges between Laura and Nown to be immensely moving, as Laura seeks to understand her creation - how he thinks, why he responds the way he does - and comes to love him. There is a distinct effort being made here - nothing comes naturally, or free from strain - knowledge has to be won, after a struggle. And I think that is true for the reader as well: there is a struggle involved, in reading this book... but by the end, I was convinced that it was worth the effort. show less