The writing and plotting of the story is solid, and the characters believable, in this somewhat predictable but interesting fantasy. There’s a rather embarrassing moment where the author apparently failed to delete notes to herself in the published manuscript, but the story has built up enough momentum that it doesn’t take too long to recover from the intrusion of reality.
The exploration of the powers of the mind, neurology, dreams, and myth is not often approached in a post-apocalyptic world, and author Gretchen Hummel creates a realistic version of the future: no utopia, but not much worse than the world we live in today.
Occasionally the message is a little heavy-handed and preachy, with some long passages of dialogue put into the main character’s mouth to explain her point of view to the family from the mainland who has come to visit the Island. The Vigilant, as the larger body of the surviving North Americans call themselves, are not hard to see as a retrenched fundamentalist religion, looking for someone to blame.
The part of the book that might put a reader off is the “Forward,” which is a section of a book from this future world called Pandect. Rather than allowing the relationships between the Islanders and the Vigilant to unfold slowly, the “Forward” gives a primer on the immediate past. It’s not all that long, and would have been more enjoyable had the information come out as part of the main part of the book.
DREAMER’S ISLAND offers an interesting vision of a possible future, generally well-told, but with a few awkward moments and heavy-handed passages of commentary.
Reviewed by Jodi McMaster for IndieReader.