I was given an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I was excited to start this novel, as this was my first Dan Frey story.
I will start by saying that I chose this book because it was listed as an audiobook format when I applied for an ARC. I received the written e-book. I primarily listen to audiobooks with the 3-hour commute I make to work. I did notice Net Galley has a “Read Aloud” option, so I used this feature to take in this story. I don’t think this feature is what was meant to be the audiobook version of this story. That being said, the different formats presented throughout the book (transcripts, emails, journal entries, and snippets from Tobin’s stories, etc.) was redundant to listen to in audio form because it would announce the person’s written name before reading the quote. I would recommend the professional audiobook recording for this book not include reading the two characters’ names before each quote, as that got mechanical.
For edits- I noticed on page 271 in the paragraph that it starts with “After several minutes….” It says catch my BEATH. I believe it should read Catch my BREATH.
A beautifully written, mashed-up love child featuring themes from Stranger Things, The Neverending Story, Labrinth, Finding Nemo, and Taken…Just to name a few!
How often have you dreamed of being immersed in the book you’re reading? We’ve all been there, actually LOST in a great story. What would happen if this actually happened in real life? And what length would you go to if this happened to your 12-year-old daughter?
This novel follows the ever-evolving journey of Byron. He’s just a regular old dad who discovers his teenage daughter, Liza, is missing. Liza is the quiet type, tends to keep to herself, and has a love for literature that’s well beyond her years. Byron believes Liza is somewhere in the Hidden World, the setting from one of Liza’s favorite fantasy book series. Byron is forced to view Liza through a new lens as he learns more about his daughter’s eccentricities and hobbies. Never mind the disapproving backlash from his dissenting ex-spouse, who believes Byron is not facing the reality that their daughter is gone for good. With the world thinking Byron has officially lost his marbles, he embarks alone on a fantastical journey to an alternative parallel universe within LA and the surrounding area to bring his daughter home. Along the way, Byron also tries to connect the cases of other children who have vanished after reading the same book series. Byron has a hunch that everything may not be as it seems with famous author Annabelle Tobin, who wrote the popular children’s series that Liza loves so much. Annabelle has recently become a recluse after the rise in popularity of her YA book series that involves a fantastical world that Liza may have stumbled into. Byron works to unearth Tobin’s secrets in a last-ditch effort to save his daughter.
I thoroughly enjoyed this fast-paced fantasy/thriller story. It was precisely the type of story that I loved to get lost in. I will be recommending this book to those that follow me on my social media accounts. I look forward to reading more from this author soon.

An urban fantasy story with a unique format. The story is told through emails and letters. It is an interesting read. Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for an ARC.

Dreambound by Dan Frey is a great book! very entertaining and interesting story. great writing as well!

This story weaves magical realism with grief and loss, and will hit home with anyone who has ever lost someone and was willing to go to the deepest depths to return them home. Set in LA, Byron tries to locate his 12 year old daughter who gas gone missing, as she was in search of the fantasy world of some of her favorite books. The structure of this book is very unique, combining things like narration, emails, and social media. Byron then learns he needs to re-frame his way of thinking if he wants her back. The plot was very unique and the structure and manner it was presented was done well.

I received this title from NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Ray in exchange for an honest review.

www.cordeliaofthepeninsula.com (June 29, 2023)

From the first page the author weaves an intricate tale through notes, e-mails and various other written pieces. It may not be the conventional way to tell a story but I found the format to be rather unique and engaging.

While I applaud the MMC Bryon's tenacity and overall steadfast determination to find his missing daughter, I have to admit that I didn't care for his personality through most of this book. His character left me feeling so many contradictory emotions, it was very thought provoking.

"Dreambound" will have you questioning where reality blurs and the unimaginable begins. I would definitely recommend giving this book a chance.

Thank you Dan Frey, Net Galley and Random Publishing Group-Ballantine , Del Ray for providing me with an ARC of this book.

I have never read another book like Dreambound by Dan Frey. I loved it. The author basically had to write two books (or at least know the plot of the second book) and weaves them together masterfully into a single story and lays them over the city of Los Angeles. LA is a character itself and though I haven't spent any significant amount of time there, it felt familiar because many of the places mentioned in the book have been used many times as movie sets. An adult fantasy book about a children's fantasy book series, Dreambound is wildly imaginative and unique.

Fairy Tale is a wildly popular book series whose final installment is about to be released. Young fans of the books, however, have been going missing all over the world. Byron is an investigative journalist hell-bent on finding his own missing daughter. His now ex-wife believes their daughter is dead, but Byron is convinced she's still out there and that her disappearance is directly related to her favorite book series. Told in a semi-epistolary format, the author uses emails, recorded interviews, and the narrator's investigative journal to tell the story.

An interesting, fun read that I enjoyed thoroughly. Magical Realism just right. I look forward to more by this author.

Dreambound is one of those stories you have to read to fully understand. I’ve tried to write this review several times and can’t quite seem to do it justice. At its core, it’s a story about belief. It questions the power and danger of belief (think Tinkerbell in Peter Pan and how belief brought her back from the brink of death) and chronicles how far a parent will go to protect their child. If I had to compare this story to others to try to give some sense of the synopsis, I’d say it’s a mashup of Taken (Liam Neeson), Inkheart (Cornelia Funke), and Emily Wilde’s Encylopaedia of Faeries.

Reading Dreambound is a commitment and requires quite a lot of suspension of what you might believe to be true or real. This story was a lot of work; not necessarily in a bad way, but just in way that made it hard for me to completely lose myself in the story. I was constantly stopping for breaks and it was slow going. I’m a really fast reader, but with this one it took me ages just to get though one round of a transcribed interviews or an email back and forth. I will say it was absolutely worth it. This book is unlike any I’ve read before and I really enjoyed its folklore and originality. I also liked the way information was presented (the story snippets, emails, transcripts, and journal entries)- it definitely matched the story narrative.

I honestly wasn’t sure how this story could possibly be wrapped up with all its fantastical threads, but the ending was absolutely perfect. A beautiful tale about the power of stories to bring our wildest ideas and dreams to life.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

An urban fantasy story with a unique format. This novel is written as a series of emails, interviews, and journal entries. The format itself kept me engaged and made the story easy to read. I think the plot was interesting but there were a few plot holes and the characters lacked depth for me. The ending also felt a little rushed as most of the action started about 70% into the book. This may be a little more YA than contemporary fiction in my opinion. I do however believe that fantasy readers may enjoy this and it’s worth a try.

Liza Kidd was an independent, quiet, twelve-year-old girl and an avid fan of Annabelle Tobin’s fantasy series Fairy Tales. One day she disappears without a trace. She had been gone for so long, and the police have found no clues. Everyone believes she must be dead. Everyone, that is, except for her father, Byron. He believes she is still alive. He just has to find her. And that is exactly what he sets out to do. His quest leads him on a very unusual adventure, one where he is forced to accept things that he had never accepted before. However, his daughter is worth everything.

In general, I do not enjoy reading fantasy, but this one seemed special, so I decided to give it a try. I am glad I did, too, because I enjoyed every second of this amazing book. Dan Frey presents the unbelievable in a matter-of-fact way, making every moment of this book feel real. His characters are so realistic, that the reader feels she knows them after reading the book.

I don’t read fantasy, but I am really glad I read this one. I could not put this one down!

I was sucked in by the blurb, but this book took me longer to read than I anticipated.

His kind of epistolary format (interviews, articles, notes) started off as an interesting way to develop the background and push the plot, and the Fairy Tale books themselves were intriguing, as was the whole idea that things could be brought into existence by believing in them.

However, I pretty quickly realized it was the main character Byron himself who I just really struggled to connect with (beyond the initially heroic quest to find his daughter). Byron was kind of a jerk to the people he encountered (and yet they continued to help him); his interactions with his ex-wife were painful, as she became more of a caricature the more they interacted.

The first part of the book is more of a mystery; the fantasy portion doesn't really get dialed up until about halfway through the book. When it does, it's really engaging and interesting - but the resolution happens really, really quickly, with an ending I certainly didn't see coming.

It's a book that I think fantasy lovers will really either love or not connect with. In the end, I did enjoy it - so I'm rounding up my 3.5 to a 4.

Some might think writing an unlikeable protagonist takes intention - what it actually takes is an author wanting you to sympathize with a character TOO much. From one perspective, I guess I can see how a middle-aged straight white man fed up with woke PC culture might enjoy Byron’s directness and no-nonsense attitude. From every other direction, though, he is a total stuck up asshole. Under other circumstances I can definitely get behind a man’s desperate quest to find a daughter dragged into a magical underground conspiracy - I CANNOT get behind Byron. He is pretentious, manipulative, and condescending, especially to women, who he alternately blackmails, infantilizes, or outright threatens. His obsessive devotion to his missing daughter becomes ironic in the face of the patronizing holier-than-thou attitude deployed towards every women in the novel, and serves to affirm my conviction that adult men of a certain mindset love their daughters until they grow up and become women they don’t approve of. I couldn’t stop thinking about Byron’s golden ideation of his missing twelve year old in comparison to the withering dislike with he treats all other women he encounters, including his LAYWER wife who is written as a callous and over-therapised shrew. One chapter starts with him emailing a queer PhD student EXPERT in her field to tell her that her FREE ADVICE (given, by the way, after he has called her a snowflake) is “interesting, but a little academic.” He proceeds to describe her office as “juvenile and fangirly” and her as “annoying” in a later chapter, despite her continued attempts to help him in the face of his unhinged behavior. He then, and I cannot make this up, proceeds to launch into a self-centered monologue about why she should agree to have children because HE didn’t want kids and then HIS child changed his life, yada yada yada. There nothing I love more seeing a grown adult man question a queer woman’s desire to have children’s based on his own wildly different experiences (Joke!!!) I almost began to root against Byron’s quest for the sheer reason that I could understand why his daughter ran away in the first place, if this is the way he treats all of the women he encounters.

I suppose a case can be made for Byron’s growth over the course of the novel, as he learns to understand and accept the world his daughter loves, though not without continuing to harshly judge it. The rest of the novel was well-paced and compelling, and told through and interesting mix of journal entities, interviews, and snippets of a shame the protagonist was so atonishingly awful as to marr what was otherwise and interesting commentary on fandom and culture surround children’s books.

COULD I GIVE THIS BOOK INFINITE STARS???? Because that's how I feel. I seriously think this might be my favorite book of the year... No joke.

I love a book transcribed through email chains and text message threads, and this book was quickly one of the quickest and most fantastical projections of a five-star read ever. There's a mystery, high fantasy, horror, and a dystopian gateway of sorts -- so there's something for everyone with Dan Frey's upcoming read, Dreambound.

I am so thankful to Del Rey Books, Dan Frey, and NetGalley for granting digital and physical access to this magnificent book. I could likely cry and scream and do a continuous cartwheel at how captivating this book left me.

Byron Kidd's daughter, Liza, has gone missing. All that he and his wife are left with is a note declaring her departure into a fictional world created by her favorite author, Annabelle Tobin, known as the Hidden World.

Months go by, and the police settle Liza's case as seemingly unsolvable, but Byron isn't ready to give up, so what does he do? He thrusts himself into Liza's fantastical fictional world, deep beneath the depths of the fan-fic and lore, to solve the mystery of the Green Man and how he's begun to claim the real world after defeating the fictional world.

Okay, yes. I don't usually classify myself as a fantasy-girlie, but this fiction-meets-reality-take on this sci-fi dystopian horror book hooked me from page one until the end. Upon his quest, Byron teams up with a fellow fan of the fey and hidden world lore, Misha, who translates the realm-specific terms and opens portals and doorways for her uncommon partner to help save the soul of his not-so-gone daughter.

After multiple run-ins with Annabelle, Misha, and Byron, we learn that this eccentric woman made a deal with the devil (or the Green Man) to save her son's life, but at the cost of bridging the fictional world with reality, ensuring further demise and destruction. It's up to Byron and his "Dad of the Year" spunk to rewrite Book Six in the Fairy Tale series for the best.

This baby hits shelves on September 12, 2023, and like get your pre-orders in now because, holy moly, this was a ride I never wanted to dismount.

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.

Dreambound is the type of fantasy I like. Much like the Hazelwood books that preceded it, Dreambound is a story set in the modern, real world, yet it also contains a book series of stories that connect to a very real other world.

Things I liked about this book:

-The way it was written fit the story quite well.

-The “is it or isn’t it” factor in the first portion of the book.

-Seeing the other world through a variety of different viewpoints (it’s real, it’s so not real, this person is delusional, etc.)

-Having real-life consequences affect what happened in the other world.

-Realistic portrayal of a fan convention and cosplaying.

Things I didn’t like about this book:

-Speaking as a neurodivergent individual, there’s no such thing as being “a bit neurodivergent.” You either are, or you’re not.

-I thought it was really lame how the dad basically told the one gal to woman up and have a kid, already. I know that parents love to think that only they know what true love is, but that’s BS.

-The dad’s personality really grated on my nerves at times.

Despite the things I didn’t like about the book, it was still so compelling that I finished it in two sittings. If you like this type of fantasy, I highly recommend it!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC. This review contains my honest, unbiased opinion.

Dreambound is an epistolary that combines interviews, news articles, and story excerpts into a magical story of a dad’s mission to find his missing daughter. I love books in alternate formats, and this was no exception. I found myself wanting to continue and read more to escape into the story and find out what happened to Liza. The ending was mindbending and had me revisiting the rest of the book in my head and piecing everything back together. It was the perfect blend of thriller, mystery, and fantasy. It reminded me of myself at 12 years old and how I would get lost in books for hours, finding respite in an alternate universe.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Thanks so much to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing me with an e-ARC copy of this book!

I have scheduled promotional posts around release day for this book and I will provide a full review on my Instagram once I am able to get to this read.

Rating 5 stars on Netgalley as a placeholder for me to update later once the review is complete.

Will also complete a review on Goodreads once read.

Thanks again!

Thank you Netgalley & publisher for this arc!

Release date: September 12, 2023

First and foremost the formatting of this book is so interesting! It’s so different, seeing the back and forth of emails, or pieces of the internet, or pieces of the note/story left behind.

Second, Byron’s description of the West Coast / LA is hilarious. His determination and love for his child is what every person should hope for in a parent. His aptitude for wanting to find answers and learn about who is daughter truly is and why she could leave or understand her decision to follow the fairytales. Val is a horrible mother and I sincerely hope she has an awakening with how she treats Byron.

Lastly, the magic trying to be tied to the real world was so interesting. I can’t really go into it without spoiling anything so I’ll leave that up you to find out. & what an ending!

This is a book about a father searching for her daughter who ran away months ago. It is mostly emails and reports
and interview transcripts and some journal pages of the father. The story mostly happens in our world, but goes toward the fantasy world closer to the end, too. There was some interesting world building there, although some questions in the book were left unanswered. The ending was ok.

I received a digital copy of the book from NetGalley

Overall I’m annoyed by this book. I wasn’t sure what to expect so I went in with some trepidation and was quickly won over and caught up in the beginning which is a fast paced opening that jumps around between emails and police reports. Unfortunately that quick pacing very much slows down in the middle as we mostly have Byron narrating through a journal and very bogged down in his search for his missing daughter. He will eventually find himself very much caught up in the world that consumed his child. To enjoy this book you very much have to set aside the world as you know it. You also have to overlook Byron being very much a self righteous pompous twit. He’s hates religion and shows constant contempt for anything he does not agree with. He still manages to be better than his daughter’s mother who we find out in emails has held a memorial for her and has no interest in finding out what happened to her. Against that background it’s not surprising she left.

It’s ironic for a book to actually be against the all consumption draw that is Fandom, in this case of course it’s the fictional kind of story but it’s still a very real form that takes place for many book lovers. One such fan becomes Byron’s sidekick in understanding the world of the book that his daughter was caught up in. That really is the heart of the story, the father searching for his daughter and at the same time owning the mistakes he made that alienated their relationship. But again it’s a very fantastical story that is best for a reader who really enjoys that kind of mythology. There was some beautiful writing at the end of the book but for me too much of the middle is a mess and caught up in Byron himself being a mess. I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

As soon as I read the description of the one I wanted to read it because the concept was so cool to me. Overall though I think it fell a little late at the end and I had a hard time sticking with this one. Still a great read with lots of interesting characters!