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There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.

Highly recommended from me. This book is sort of a melancholy post-apocalyptic coming-of-age survival story, but with a dreamlike tint. It's uncompromising in not giving any pat answers to any of its questions. Why are these women here? Where has everybody else gone? Is this even earth? I feel like it explores a lot of ideas around trauma and knowledge and purpose, but at its heart I feel like it's really getting at what it means to be human when you are disconnected from past social structures but also disconnected from hope for the future.

The characters in this book were amazing and the scathing look at the American prison system is fantastic. It was great to get to know many of the characters, even if they were not the main ones being followed. I did have a little difficulty tracking who we were following at times while listening to the audiobook. Nothing major, just a few times I had to skip back.

Adjei-Brenyah really brought these characters to life and I definitely was a little sad in the end. This is a weird book because you're hopeful because you want to side with the characters, but you're also having to grapple with knowing how things will play out because of how messed up the prison system is and how America uses prisoners for their own gain. The real-life call outs on things that have actually happened in and through our prison systems was a great touch and really made you have to compare this fiction to reality.

The one thing that keeps me from giving this 4 stars is that while the main storyline was very cohesive and linear, a lot of the other chapters came across more as short stories and I had a hard time with them being randomly inserted through the book.

I liked this book, but I did not enjoy it.

I really enjoyed the overall storyline going on in this book. You're following Penny as she vies to get her dream job at The Dallergut Dream Department Store, and getting to see the customers that come to buy the dreams as well as the creators of the dreams. I had a really fun time seeing how Lee gave meaning to different types of dreams, even nightmares.

There is one area that this book lost me, and it's still bothering me. There is a point in the story where the workers at The Dallergut are able to get dreams that they've been wanting to try out. It's the only time that life outside of The Dallergut bubble is really mentioned, and it sent me through a rabbit hole of wondering if that means that those that reside in the dream realm need to sleep and eat like their customers, is it a fun little thing that they're able to experience the dream without sleeping...and it never gets explained. Even after Penny gets her dream, it's never mentioned again. So that irked me a bit.

Overall, I still really enjoyed the book, though, so I'm still going to give it 3 stars and I would say I recommend it still. Just know that there's some parts where it appears the world is building up more, but there's no real conclusion to it.