A Dream Wants Waking By Lydia Kwa

Often, I read a book and I love it.

Sometimes, I read a book and I think it’s great.

Sometimes, I read a book and get to the end and still honestly can’t tell if I’ve just read something brilliant, something terrible, something I liked, or something that I barely noticed passing before my eyes as a blur of text…

A Dream Wants Waking by Lydia Kwa (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) isn’t quiiiiite a blur in my recent memory, but it is something that I still – after hours of reflection since finishing it – honestly cannot decide if I think it was good or not…

I liked it, though, I can say that with some degree of certainty…

I read through it quickly, yearned to get back to it while I wasn’t reading it, and found the experience satisfying, satisfactory, and very engaging…

But I never quite found myself certain that the pleasures and the joys I was taking from the text were necessarily ones that were there by control, and may instead have been there by accident…

There are gaps in the narrative, there are gaps in clarity of the world-building, and though I felt capable of filling those gaps in myself (as and when needed for the plot), I just couldn’t decide if the absent details were absent because a) they weren’t necessary to the novel’s fun; b) because Kwa trusted a reader to to do what I was doing, or c) if no thought had been given to them at all…

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A Dream Wants Waking is set in a distant future, where the world has been destroyed (to some extent) by climactic and nuclear tragedies, but the ways in which the world has been damaged, the ways in which land masses and geographical areas and resources have been affected, is always vague…

We are in a city somewhere in what was once China, and there is a (capitalised) Central Government controlling this area and this Central Government is almost entirely reliant, practically, on a genetically modified whale brain that controls all the technological functions of this city (and world?).

Does humanity exist outside of this city, this state and area?

Is this city, state and area the government headquarters of the entire world or just of this place?

Are there people who do not live under Central Government’s control elsewhere?

How big is the world?

How big is the population?

How many people exist?

Some people that exist are human-animal chimeric hybrids that were initially bred to be slaves and workers and now seem to exclusively be sex slaves, but some of them also seem to not be and just live in a ghettoised District of the city known as Dream City, which also seems to both exist as a real place but also be imbued with some kind of magic..?

How many chimeric people are there? And are all that do exist living in Dream City???

The protagonist is a chimeric animal-human hybrid, but not because she was bred to it, genetically modified by scientists, but because she is the embodiment of an ancient Fox spirit…

This fox spirit is locked in a millennia-long battle with a demon, who in this timeline has possessed the body of someone leading a religious cult (the one religious cult permitted by Central Government – why?)…

The fox spirit is also a professional security guard at a casino and a (at the start and end of the book retired (but not in the middle)) extremely skilled professional mixed martial arts type fighter, and she’s also also a semi-professional storyteller. And she’s also someone who yearns to be reunited with the best friend she ever had, whose souls were separated a very long time ago due to the intervention of the enemy demon (or possibly not…).

There is an ancient artefact that is part of the body of the turtle that created the world, and a document created in partnership with this, which the demon is trying to get hold of in order to forever escape the demonic dimension…

There are gangs led by the hybrid chimeric people who seem to be in much more spiritual connection with the ancient gods, goddesses and spirits of the Eternal world than everyone else…

There are lots of flashbacks to the previous lifetimes of the fox spirit and her friend and also people who have interacted with her, and the various people throughout history who have briefly (or not so briefly) been custodians of the special document and/or the turtle relic…

Chapters bounce around in time, but every single chapter has a heading clarifying both chronological and geographic location, so at no point does it ever get confusing….

The choice to include these headings is one of the things that makes me question whether or not what is a very chaotic novel is actually completely aware of what it’s doing…

As you can probably tell from those notes above, and the fact that this novel is only just over 200 pages long, it is chaos…

Almost every single page and every single chapter adds a new story, a new character, a new relationship, a new history, a new twist…

It’s a novel that is overflowing with story ideas, and with characters and with references to ancient (and not so ancient) mythologies…

It does feel (until about 30 pages from the end) that it would be absolutely impossible for every thread to be tied up, and though it somehow does and does feel both neat and intentional, it also feels like it might not have been…

The way in which long, meandering, threads are tied up is satisfying yet also sudden…

And, yet, I liked it.

I did feel satisfied by the structure. But I didn’t necessarily believe I should have!!!

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I think this is where my confusion stems from: I liked A Dream Wants Waking, and I felt like everything was neatly connected, but this novel really felt out of control.

…Expanding and bursting and jumping out and leaping in multiple directions all at once….

Was it controlled chaos that was always meant to feel out of control???

Or uncontrolled chaos that someone, in a panic, went through and essentially checked for open brackets before closing them all at the end???

Finding every thread, every idea (possibly missing a few), and tying up everything hanging loose???

I JUST DON’T KNOW

So, yes, I enjoyed it a lot.

I found it very interesting.

I think the world building it was doing, the narratives it was telling and the intersecting and engaging storylines within it were all engaging…

(Oh, I didn’t even mention above that the AI-whale in charge of the city was trying to escape its confines as a non-physical being and manifest into a body, but while doing this it was faking to everyone but one scientist that this was happening.)

It was – for me at least – a pleasure to read…

It was great…

The previous book I read was also a novel that jumped around in time and location and didn’t feel in control of itself, so I don’t know if my positive experience of A Dream Wants Waking was merely relief at its writer being better at signposting settings of a complex narrative… Or is Lydia Kwa actually great at this?

Yes, definitely better than the previous writer I read, but is she good?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Buuuuuuut if I was still living in Canada and had access to independent bookstores and disposable income to spend in them (please donate here so I can buy books slash vegetables), I would almost certainly pick up another book by Lydia Kwa, because there was something incredibly compelling, incredibly exciting and incredibly interesting going on here, and though by the end of the book, I wasn’t 100% certain how I felt about it, I 100% was intrigued, interested and excited enough to continue reading her work just in case it is excellent.

So yes, if Lydia Kwa or her publishers are reading this and have some review copies they’re happy to ship to the UK, then please do get in touch. I would love to get a second look at Kwa’s writing and see if I can make a decision after reading that…

Email me and I’ll send you an address.

I liked it, yes.

Yes.

A Dream Wants Waking is published by Wolsak and Wynn. Order it directly via this link.