War has come to the Tourmaline Archipelago. The Amity finds itself threatened by an Elbaite fleet armed with weapons of unparalleled destructive power supplied from our world - the Realt - by the shadowy forces of the Hegemony.
Fleeing from this devastation, Alison Owens - the last survivor of the raft-island Stray - takes refuge in the city of Carden, where she begins to discover the scope of her abilities as a lucid dreamer in this world on the other side of sleep. Meanwhile, Bobby Jenkins must infiltrate the Hegemony itself to find the secret of how to return to Tourmaline and the woman he loves.
But there are darker forces than the Hegemony in play. The Brood of Lilivet have taken hosts, and they seek to awaken an unspeakable evil which lies neither in Tourmaline, nor the Realt, but the dreaming space between.
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[Sometimes, when we dream, we dream too deeply, and we find ourselves in the world which lies on the other side of consciousness]***
(@snowbooks, 1 May 2015, 320 pages, ebook from @AmazonKindle)
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I loved this book almost as much as Tourmaline. Like its predecessor, this book is crazy, utterly mad. I have no choice but to love it. This book is much darker and the ending shocked me to my core and made me desperate for the final part of the trilogy. In this book the world of our dreams is a real place. That's a scary thought to me and I would not like my dreams to take on flesh and form. Who would? This book and Tourmaline remind me of the work of Neil Gaiman and The Dark Tower books by Stephen King. I loved the way events move back and forth between real Birmingham (titular Realt) and the Tourmaline Archipelago offering up plenty of drama, action and madness. I loved the fact this book explores different locations in Tourmaline showing just how vast this world is.
