Dreambender
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Jeremy controls the dreams of City dwellers to keep the earth safe. But then he sees Callie dreaming of singing and begins to wonder if there is more to life than being safe.
Everyone in the City is assigned a job by the choosers—keeper, catcher, computer. Callie Crawford is a computer. She works with numbers: putting them together, taking them apart. Her work is important, but sometimes she wants more. Jeremy Finn is a dreambender. His job is to adjust people's dreams. He and others like him quietly remove thoughts of music and art to keep the people in the City from becoming too focused on themselves and their own feelings rather than on the world. They need to keep the world safe from another Warming. But Jeremy thinks music is beautiful, and when he pops into a dream of Callie singing, he becomes fascinated with her. He begins to wonder if there is more to life than being safe. Defying his community and the role they have established for him, he sets off to find her in the real world. Together, they will challenge their world's expectations. But how far will they go to achieve their own dreams?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This surprisingly upbeat dystopian tale may remind many readers of Lois Lowry's The Giver, with which it shares several significant plot points. Thirteen-year-old Callie Crawford is a "computer," a mathematician living in the post-apocalyptic City, dedicated to avoiding the high-tech hubris that led to the Warming and the fall of civilization. Jeremy Finn is a "dreambender," a psychic dream therapist who enters the dreams of City residents and manipulates them, turning them away from thoughts or actions that might endanger the City's fragile ecological balance. When Jeremy is assigned to Callie's dreams and ordered to end her potentially disruptive love of music, he finds that he can't do it. Jeremy compounds his crime by directly contacting Callie, something that is strictly forbidden, and the two children soon wind up on the run. Alternating between Callie and Jeremy's first-person perspectives, Kidd (Night on Fire) tells an enjoyable story that features both appealing protagonists and well-presented ideas about the importance of creativity and following one's dreams. Ages 9 12.
