If you go to Goodreads or any other source that can give you this novels description and then read A City Dreaming you will find that much of what the description describes doesn’t actually happen until the end of the novel. The protagonist is M, a sorcerer with untold power but who is also a drifter, hipster, and slacker living in Brooklyn. After five years abroad he returns to New York where he catches up with old friends, gets in and out of magic based trouble multiple times, and maybe even saves the world.
The first thing you will notice when reading this book is that each chapter is less like a chapter but more like a series of short stories that share the same characters and timeline but little other than that. There is an obvious beginning and end to the main story, but if you are looking at each chapter individually you will find that very little of what happens in these chapters in the middle of the novel connects to the conclusion at all. To some people this can be offputting, but personally I find this way of storytelling pretty interesting especially since this story structure allows people who don’t have much time to read books to read a chapter at a time without worrying much about connecting details. This is definitely not a book to be read all at once.
When I first met M within the first couple of chapters in A City Dreaming I instantly thought that he was going to be a boring character who thought about little else than sex, money, and drugs (all of which show up a lot in the novel). As I continued reading however I discovered that though he was forced into many of the adventures he went on in these chapters.
This is a good book to read if you don’t have much time to read books. You can read it over a few days or a few years because of the way the story is formatted. All in all I liked this book. Just a quick warning it can get very adult so don’t give it to your kids to read.
Final Rating – 44/50
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