Emma's Reviews > Dreamland Burning

C/W:(view spoiler)[racial slurs, racism, violence, descriptions of dead bodies, car accident, death by car accident, mentions of rape + threats of sexual violence (hide spoiler)]

Dreamland Burning is a challenging book to review in a lot of ways. The prose was propulsive from the first page but couldn't quite distract from the number of large problems I had with the story and its execution.

After reading about a 100 pages, I looked up the author in the hopes that knowing the perspective the book was written from could clarify some of the issues I was beginning to have with the story. As someone who shares the same background as the author -- white and a women -- I'm hesitant to say that certain people shouldn't write certain stories as it's really not my position to weigh in on that. I did notice repeatedly throughout the book that race and racism were positioned in ways that indicated a surface-level acknowledgement of racism but an unwillingness to really interrogate the roles that systemic racism plays in all of our lives. Failing to do the deeper work of unpacking systemic racism is something I notice white people, myself included at times, can be hesitant to do as it's impossible not to also grapple with how white people benefit from systemic racism even if they oppose it. The handling of racism in this book happened at a very surface level, which did the story it was trying to tell a true disservice.

A key example of this involves the main character of the 1920s narrative, Will. (view spoiler)[Will instigates a fight with a Black man, Clarence, at a speakeasy because the man is there with Will's crush, a white woman. The fight leads to Clarence later getting attacked by a group of white man and eventually dying from his injuries. Will feels a bit uncomfortable about the consequences of his actions, mainly because his crush publicly calls him out about it. He never meaningfully reflects on why he behaved in this way or whether he'd act this way in the future but the reader isn't supposed to worry about it as Will now knows two other Black people so his racist views are considered solved. (hide spoiler)]

The characterization of the side characters who are people of color was incredibly flat. It was very clear to me that these characters were tokens for the story, rather than real people. Characters who appear a lot on the page, like Ruby, are defined by one or two attributes -- Ruby likes to cause trouble and enjoys pinching boys she likes -- that are just an outline of a personality but not a fully-fleshed character. An instance of this that made me particularly irate was the character of Arvind, a Black man who is implied to be unhoused, that Rowan meets at her job at the clinic. Arvind doesn't get much page time and is only given the briefest outline as a character but (view spoiler)[his death is used to move the plot forward and (in theory) to spur Rowan's character development, though the actual believability of her growth was hard to believe. (hide spoiler)] Arvind is perhaps the defining example in Dreamland Burning of how the author used people of color within the story as tokens rather than portraying them as real people.

I also had some serious issues with the racial slurs used in this novel. The author's note says

"Some characters in the book use derogatory terms for African Americans and Native Americans, though not as freely as they would have in 1921. These words are ugly, offensive, and hateful, but I chose to include them because I felt that blunting the sharp edges of racism in a book about genocide would be a mistake."

Besides the fact that these slurs seem to mainly be used for shock value and to be a lazy way of characterizing some characters as racists, it felt wrong to see a member of an oppressing group use words with incredible historical + emotional baggage that have been used to strip away others' humanity. There are plenty of ways to convey the insidious horrors of racism without seeing these words over and over on the page in a book written by a white woman and published in 2017.

There were certainly more issues in Dreamland Burning that I didn't touch on here. I'll definitely be searching out other critical reviews of this book that look at this concepts with more depth. Overall, I would definitely not recommend reading this novel.