“Lair of Dreams” is a Disappointing, Slow Sequel

“Dreams are the only place any of us is free.”

I was astonished when the nearly six-hundred page massive chunker of a book, The Diviners, managed to enrapture me from the first page. It kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time and the plot never once felt slow. In fact, it was so exciting I wished the story would never end.

I was right to worry when I doubted Lair of Dreams would live up to the first book’s amazing immersive quality. But I wasn’t prepared for it to be quite this boring.

There was literally no plot for the first 550 pages. And by “plot” I mean a driven story with an end goal in sight. 95% of the book focused on drama about the main characters’ lives.

Evie’s chapters were by far my favorite. While I found the rest of the cast’s narratives boring, I loved being inside Evie’s 1920s flapper girl mind. Evie is the kind of person who appears to be selfish and petty on the outside, but deep down she’s really caring and compassionate.

In this sequel Evie is back as the popular “Sweetheart Seer” who outed herself as a Diviner. But she has more important things to worry about than parties and interviews when a deadly disease known as the sleeping sickness begins spreading across New York.

In The Diviners a wonderful villain by the name of Naughty John was introduced in the very beginning of the book and we continued to see small, terrifying glimpses of him throughout the story. This created fantastic character development so that by the end I felt like I had got to know him and all his horrible, villainous ways.

With Lair of Dreams, this is not the case. The villain isn’t who you expect and there is a big reveal at the end, but I honestly felt nothing during the final showdown. Naughty John was scary, complex, and had layers of evilness about him. This new bad guy seemed cheap in comparison.

I kept putting this book down and not wanting to pick it up again because nothing exciting was happening. At times, I had to force myself to continue. I might’ve cared more about the subplots following Memphis and Theta, the dream walkers, Sam’s mother, and the love square between Evie, Sam, Mabel, and Jericho, but they were so repetitive and drawn out that they started to annoy me.

It’s not that the characters, writing, or setting were bad. In fact, Libba Bray’s writing was quite beautiful. It’s that the plot was nonexistent for the majority of the book. I nearly wept in relief when the pace finally picked up during the last sixty pages, though I wish the ending hadn’t been resolved so quickly.

Lair of Dreams was just so, so slow compared to the first book. Such a disappointment.