I didn't know what to expect reading the synopsis, but I was actually hooked right away. It was kind of a strange story, but I loved it. The story was unique and entertaining. Definitely look into it if you enjoy fantasy books.

I received a Netgalley ARC of Ryan la Sala’s magically realistic novel Reverie in exchange for an honest review, and I am so glad to have gotten the chance to start my 2020 with this gem. The story begins with Kane Montgomery struggling to make sense of a car accident; according to police reports, the wreck that inflicted massive damage on his town’s historical mill was all his fault, but Kane can remember nothing surrounding that moment. After meeting Dr. Poesy during an interrogation, though, Kane starts to realize that the accepted trail of events may not tell the whole story, causing him to question the very reality around him. Soon, Kane is battling through previously unfathomable realms and reclaiming his memories--and his potential--with a group of newly-rediscovered friends dubbed “The Others.”

What I loved about this novel was the nuance of the plot, the crystal-clear characterization, and the superb, wry prose. For example, one “reverie” is spawned by rude boys in Kane’s gym class who are described as being “in the process of peaking early in life.” Characters such as Ursula are described with such precision that I could picture her in front of me, even when she was performing such unbelievable acts as donning a wedding dress while karate-kicking an oversized, bejeweled beetle. And if that sentence sounds completely incongruous, that’s the other thing that was so wonderfully intoxicating about this book: despite how outlandish the premise, the plot just worked. Are there moments when a teacup can swallow an entire world? Yep! Can reality grind completely to a halt from time to time? Of course! Do we have a realm-bending drag queen as a main character? Sure! Yet in reading la Sala’s words, it’s so obvious that none of these things could be any other way. Finally, amid these completely entertaining moments, there is such a message of hope for any reader who feels on the fringes; although la Sala acknowledges the “secret sadness that [grows] like mold in the humidity of a life kept closed” when Kane considers himself as a queer person, the story ends on such a positive note as to encourage those who may not have yet found their way toward acceptance.

With its beautifully written prose, positive message, and thrill-ride plot, Reverie is a strong purchase for school libraries and a strong recommendation for students who have enjoyed titles such as Stephanie Garber’s Caraval or the Sci-Fi series The Magicians.

I was very excited to receive this eARC from #Netgalley and am delighted to report I wasn't disappointed at all. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to read and review it.

Reverie is beautifully written by Ryan La Sala, full of vivid imagery and prose, so very unique in its creativity and just an absolute delight to read. Where do authors get their fantastic imaginations from?!

I loved the diversity of the high school characters: firstly our protagonist Kane, gay, confused, looking for acceptance but always running from something, and totally oblivious to the fact that he has the best type of friends who would follow him into the unimaginable, because they believe in him. Then there's Ursula, so strong physically, yet so vulnerable and unsure of herself too; Adeline, brave and fiery and loyal and absolutely nothing like her 'cheerleader' facade, Elliot the high school jock, adored by all and part of the 'in crowd', but how much of his persona is actually an illusion, and of course Dean, the mysterious interloper and protector, but where do his loyalties actually lie? Lat but not least of course, you have the arch-villain Poesy, the powerful, magical, drag queen sorceress😈 What a character!

The premise of the story is that concurrently/simultaneously (I wasn't totally sure which, but this is a tale of magic and deception, so don't hold it against me) with life as we know it, people's reveries (dreams/nightmares) are being played out like live theatre, with the players having no memory of the reverie once it's 'unravelled'. Only our heroes are able to remember, participate and actively affect the end result of the reverie.

But there's more to it than that. There's (of course) an evil plan for world domination, a hero who can't remember who he is or what he can do, and layers upon layers of secrets and lies and red herrings.

I completely loved it! Highly recommended and 4 ✨✨✨✨

"What makes this book especially powerful to me as a queer reader myself, is not only does it feature a gay protagonist, but the powerful and magical authorities are ALSO queer, like gender-fluid drag queen sorceress, Poesy, who travels worlds and takes a special interest in Kane for reasons we find out later in the book. People like Poesy become possibility models for Kane’s growth as a queer character in both the realism and magical elements of the story." excerpt from online review below.

I wanted to like this more than I did - the idea behind it was wondrous, but something about the execution fell flat for me. So many of the separate parts of this book should have added up to a favourite - a month has passed since I read it, but I can still clearly picture the characters in my mind. A fun read, even if it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

The first couple chapters of REVERIE kind of had me scratching my head– I couldn’t quite get my head around what was happening– but then things clicked and I got into the story and especially Kane as a character.

He’s funny, but angsty– which has to be my favorite combo– and while he’s desperately serious, he kept me laughing with his insights and side observations.

REVERIE is a weird book, for sure. But it’s a super endearing weird. I love the way the book stretches and twists reality and has Kane and his friends jumping in and out of different dream-like sequences.

If you mashed together the dream-jumping element from the movie INCEPTION and added the upbeat, liveliness of a Caleb Roehrig novel, you’d have something like REVERIE. I had so much fun reading it, and I can’t wait to see what Ryan LaSala writes next.

I’m sad. Mostly because the idea of a gay kid having superpowers that including shooting rainbows out of his hands sounds great. But I was expecting this book to be less fantastical and more based in reality.

I have a hard time with narratives where the POV has amnesia. It’s frustrating in a bad way. And Kane’s attitude and behavior didn’t help matters at all. I really like the group of friends and the epilogue was more of what I wanted the story to be (minus like kitschy Halloween part just more of a group of friends being friends and solving magical problems).

I’m sad I didn’t enjoy this, but I know many people love it and I would not stop someone from reading it. It is a slow story, the plot moves very slowly and folds back on itself a lot and I found that to be annoying but others seem to really like it. This is probably just a case of wrong reader syndrome.

I'm not even sure where to begin with how much I loved this! Reverie has an incredibly promising concept and absolutely delivers with the wonderful characters, prose and reveries themselves. The imaginative ways that each reverie was crafted and written, plus the clever ways they were interlocked with the cast's experiences and stories, were an utter delight to read. I adored all of the characters, their strong, dynamic friendships and the unapologetic expression of their identities.

This is definitely a book I'll be gladly returning to and reading again and again.

I received this book the publishers via Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

I found this really intriguing and lovely! I really enjoyed the concept and how unreliable Kane was as a narrator, so we find things out alongside him. That worked well for me. The reveries themselves are honestly such a cool idea - i definitely see the comparison to Inception here! But I also like that we get to see both "quieter" ones as well as ones that go wrong.

I did find it a little hard to get into at first but only because I was tired and you know something is up and you're not sure what! Once the main story gets going and Kane learns more of what is going on, it really picks up and I couldn't put it down.

This book is also wonderfully queer - Kane is gay, but there's a whole host of queerness including someone who never names it, but is written as gender queer, complete with changing pronouns, and I *adored* that!

The friendship is wonderful when it gets going too - especially as we learn more about what happened. I really liked how everyone's powers worked with their personalities, but also how it helped us get to know them.

Reverie is a teen fantasy superhero adventure romance… a bit of everything for everyone!

Kane has had an ‘accident’ and has lost his memory of the events surrounding it. Gradually he becomes aware that there is more missing from his life, and embarks, reluctantly and suspiciously, on an adventure that sees him facing down evil, fighting for what he believes in, and making dreams come true – but not necessarily good dreams.

Perhaps more importantly, he makes some friends. The problem is whether he can trust them when he can’t even remember them.

There are elements of the familiar, like X-Men style super-powers and an Inception-like incursion into the imaginations of other people. Ryan La Sala has created a fresh story here though, with some very endearing characters and a fascinating take on following your dreams. I particularly loved that in order to resolve each ‘reverie’ the team had to first identify which literary or pop culture trope it was following and then blend in with it – like a cross between puzzle-solving and an RPG!

A strong theme running through the book is that of otherness, or feeling like an outsider. Alongside that are plenty of positive lessons about learning to love oneself – the bad as well as the good – but the author doesn’t preach, allowing the story to make his points for him organically as the plot unfolds.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it was great to see LGBTQIA characters represented naturally and with complexity. I would definitely read more from this author, especially in the same fiction-verse, and would recommend it to teens upward looking for a fun fantasy read.



Kane might have noticed Sophia look away too quick if he wasn’t watching a shadow behind her break away from the wall and scamper, huge and spider-like, across a doorway.
“Something’s in here,” he whispered.

– Ryan La Sala, Reverie

Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

"Just because something is imagined doesn't mean it isn't dangerous."
This was a message the characters in Inception needed to hear and wildly ignored, but it is something that the characters in Reverie slowly began to understand and adapt to, thank goodness. It's a difficult thing because we tend to find hope in our dreams, in the things our mind tells us in quiet places. However, these hidden whispers can be dangerous, wicked in their stealthy ways. Despite all the negative things that happen to the characters throughout, they still hold on to their hope, the small pieces of themselves that keep them going.

Ryan La Sala weaves humor into the dark moments and keeps the reader invested in the action throughout. I'm not always in love with realistic fantasy that occurs in the "real world;" but I was invested the entire time while reading this, always anxious to the new and varied ways in which the "real world" changed to adapt to the characters, the magic, and the circumstances. I'm always in love with romance of any kind in a novel and the romance in this one did not disappoint. It was careful and kind, building up appropriately so that the reader falls as the characters fall, bringing you in with them. I recommend this book to others and have already done so to make more queer friendly books available to my students.

I wanted to love this so much but I had so much trouble understanding it all. It just seemed pretty messy and I couldn't connect to the characters either. I'll probably try whatever else this author writes because I see some promise but this wasn't my kind of book!

Kane wakes up in the hospital and has no memories of how he got there. People keep telling him that he stole his parents car then crashed it into a building which proceeded to blow up. As he tries to return to normal life everything feels a little off so now he has to try to uncover the clues to see what actually happened with some strangers who claim that they were once really good friends.
I thought the concept sounded very original and interesting and I think this story could have been great, but for me everything just seemed so flat and the story dragged on and on. The whole story just seemed all over the place and disjointed. The characters also had no depth and I felt like I never got to know them. Maybe of the characters spent more time in the real world instead of the dream world. Then the romance that the main character in seemed undeveloped and forced. The cover was beautiful which is all I can say I enjoyed about the book.

Ryan La Sala’s debut book, Reverie, is a dynamic, action-packed adventure that digs into the worlds between fantasy and reality. It asks a central question that carries the plot of the book forward—what makes reality real?

Reverie follows Kane Montgomery, a teenage boy who was found half dead in a river and who has no memories of his past. The bits of memory that remain are confusing and leave him with more questions than answers. Nevertheless, he is determined to find out more about the circumstances of his incident and life pre-memory loss.


Sourcebooks Fire
While searching for answers, he meets Ursula, a girl who he learns was his best friend. She is cautious around him and they build an uneasy friendship. When he goes back to school , he learns he had two other friends in his group — Elliot and Adeline.

But not everything is what it seems. He find out about the mysterious world he used to be involved with after overhearing his friends talk about him behind his back. He learns that they called themselves The Others. The group possess magical powers that help them control the reveries. Reveries are people’s inner fantasies that play out in the real world. They follow story lines and their constructed worlds are fragile and dangerous. Kane and his group of friends are able to stay lucid during them and guide the reveries to a natural finishing place. Disrupting a reverie before it ends can cause catastrophic problems. The crew are experts at handling them, and in one particular scene make light of some of their crazier adventures by recounting old stories.

This book is flashy in all the right ways, especially with the deliciously wicked Dr. Posey. There has never been a villain so fabulously nefarious in recent YA book history. Dr. Posey is a drag queen sorceress who wants to rip the seams of reality as Kane knows it.

Be warned—some of the explanations of the mechanics of the world are blink and miss. This is a book that you really have to close read, because it’s very easy to get lost in it. Like Kane—you’ll be stuck wondering how you got there in the first place.

The reveries themselves are some of the most interesting aspects of the book. Each mini world unravels different parts of the plot—it feels like puzzle pieces coming together. It’s almost like reading a fanfiction AU of the book—in realtime. Stylistically, the reverie fantasy sequences, let La Sala write in different genre styles all while staying within the same story which was compelling to read.

Described as Inception meets The Magicians, Reverie is a must read for fans of dream bending, magic heavy stories. It’s a roller coaster of a read with vibrancy that glows beyond its pages.

Reviewon TheYoungYolks.com

Reverie is a fresh and innovative YA fantasy that stands out from the rest with its creativity, representation, lively prose, and willingness to tackle difficult issues such as homophobia and bullying. Perfect for any reader looking for a vividly LGBT fantasy or a book they won't be able to put down.

This books was incredibly ambitious for a debut. It was a clear attempt for the author to try writing different genres within the greater novel. However, there really isn't anything outstanding about it. It was fine but not great.

I would also like to mention that this book is in severe need of additional editing. I actually read a final copy and there were so many spelling and grammar mistakes.

I spent a good portion of 2019 trying to actively read more own voices and more queer books, especially books with queer male leads that are actually written by men. I follow Ryan La Sala on Twitter and adore him, and am thankful to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for a chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rants, Raves, and Reviews

I liked this book, but I didn’t love it as much as I wanted. And I am wondering if the book had been described as “hey you remember how annoyed you were that it wasn’t okay in Persona to romance someone of the same sex, but it is okay to romance adults as a teenager? This book is Persona but gay” if I would have been able to wrap my head around it more?

Our main character is Kane, who I overall liked. His sense of isolation, not knowing who to trust…all of this I am all about. But all these characters get introduced (Ursula, Adeline, Dean, and Elliot) and none of them ever come across as trustworthy? I mean I get that we aren’t supposed to really trust anyone, and that Kane is an unreliable narrator. But really, overall the book just….feels like an overly complex book with shallow characters? Like the magic system is just overly complex, but the characters just don’t seem to develop much. I almost would have loved it if we had seen more than Kane’s point of view? And it may have helped with explaining the Reveries a little better. I mean, the definition of a Reverie is essentially a daydream, so it shouldn’t be that overly complicated. And because the reveries were complicated, the plot just got even more confusing. There is something about magic systems in YA books that I am just not jiving with anymore.

Final Moments

If you’re looking for a more in-your-face queer book with magic, give this book a shot. And by in-your-face, I mean the main character’s super powers are literally rainbows shooting out of his hands? It wasn’t quite for me obviously, but I am excited to see where La Sala is going in the future.

Another gorgeous cover, another intriguing book description! To be honest, I really had very little to go on when requesting this book. Part of it may have spoken to my withdrawals from “The Starless Sea” with some of the similar-sounding descriptions of mystical worlds each with their own story. December always seems to be a bit thin in the pickings, too, so anything that sparks interest is usually a go around now. Alas, even no expectations were too many for this book.

Kane knows very little about himself or his life. Found half dead on the side of a river, he only feels a sense of…difference. About him?About the world? About the mystery behind what happened to him? So when three others show up claiming to be his friends, he jumps at the opportunity to learn more. But he quickly realizes that this mystery is much greater than a near-drowning. Now, worlds are opening in the middle of the ordinary places in the world, each with their own stories and histories. How does his own experience connect with these mysteries? And is that even the biggest problem Kane faces now?

Ah, too bad. Another story that falls into the too simple and too common box of “missed potential.” These types of books are almost the hardest to review because there is nothing overtly wrong or offensive about the book, and, more often than not, they still have good qualities that hold them together. But by the final page, I’m left with an overwhelming sense of indifference and a fixation on the hours spent reading this book instead of some other book.

Amnesia stories, to start with, are very hard to pull off. The main character of the story is a necessary blank, having no point of reference of history, prior relationships, ongoing emotional struggles to draw upon. This leaves their observations and reactions feeling hollow. It’s hard to feel connected to a character who isn’t connected himself. This is the problem with Kane in a big way. Through the entire book, I just never really cared about him. He was instead mostly just a blank slate around which to build this story and magical world.

The world-building and writing was both a hit and a miss for me as well. On one hand, several of the descriptions of events and places were beautiful and new. But on the other hand, they weren’t the type of descriptions that read easily. I’m not sure how to put my finger on this. But I found myself having to re-read several lines to really put together how a particular metaphor was being used or what was being described. Perhaps having just read “Starless Sea” made this particular misstep hit home a bit harder than it would have at other times. That book, too, used very unique language to describe strange and new imagery. But there, somehow, the words flowed in a way that wasn’t distracting and didn’t throw me out of the story quite as badly as a similar style did here.

I also struggled to fully understand the rules of the world. How exactly do reveries work? What are their boundaries? There was definitely an interesting idea to be found here, but between the blank that was Kane and the distracting writing, I was already too out of this story to be able to turn my brain off and just go with the flow.

All of that being said, I did like Kane’s love interest, and in many ways, he had a lot more character building given to him than Kane himself did. And, while the writing style did kick me out of the flow of things every once in a while, there were also some legitimately lovely pieces of word play. But, in the end, my main takeaway was that this book didn’t accomplish all that it set out to. It was too bad. Others, however, might still enjoy this story. If you’re looking for a unique, LGBT fantasy, this does do well on all of those counts. Just not really my cup of tea, I guess.

Rating 6: Nothing terrible, but amnesia strikes again at taking down its main character and the unique word play hurts the flow of the story more often than it helps.

This was an interesting read to say the least. I really liked the idea and concept of the story with the reveries and how diverse this was, but I couldn't connect with the characters in the way I wanted to and the plot seemed a little disconnected to me. But with all that being said this was still very entertaining and I very much appreciated having a queer driven story. I think this book was very original and had something new to bring to the YA book industry.

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read this novel!

Rating: 2.75 stars
Rep: gay MC

This is the epitome of a "me not you" situation. I 100% see why people adore this book and I really wish I was one of them!

I want to start by talking about the things I loved:
-How queer it was. I knew going in that this would be extremely gay and it definitely delivered!
-The first 50% was really interesting and gripping.
-I loved the characters, and while I wish there was a little bit more character development at times, overall I really liked them, Kane especially.
-Another thing that made me want to read this was the tagline "drag queen sorceress" in the synopsis, and let me tell you, that character did not disappoint.

Things I didn't like:
-Around the 60% mark is where I got lost. If someone sat me down and asked me to recount a scene from the last 40% of this book...I wouldn't be able to. I was thoroughly confused and lost and ultimately just wanted it to end. Now, I don't know whether that was a "me" problem (not paying enough attention) or whether the book lacked world-building.


Overall, I would still recommend this to people looking for LGBTQ+ fantasy, this just wasn't the book for me personally.