What I’m Reading: Dreams and Shadows

I just got back from the Old Settler’s Music Festival in Austin. And with that, I thought it would be appropriate to return to a book I read a little while ago but which is Austin-based as well: Dreams and Shadows by C. Robert Cargill.

I have to say, I love a good gritty fairy tale—where innocent childhood stories are lifted up and twisted around until you see the dark uncanny underbelly lurking underneath. And Dreams and Shadows doesn’t disappoint. We start off with what seems like a sweet love-at-first-sight story, with two kids named Jared and Tiffany who fall in love in high school, get married and have a baby named Ewan. But things go sour when Ewan gets switched at birth for a changeling named Knocks. Pretty soon both Tiffany and Jared come to unpleasant ends—and Knocks is a bitter creature, nursing a grudge against the boy whose life he stole, Ewan, who now lives as a human among fae.

There’s another young boy living a parallel life—Colby, who meets a djinn named Yashar. He wishes for Yashar to give him the ability to see all the paranormal things—and after he does this, he can never go back home. Yashar takes him on a journey, where he sees many wonderful and terrible things—and becomes something he never intended to be.

Colby, Ewan, and Knocks meet up again as young adults—on the streets of Austin and in the surrounding countryside. My favorite storyline was Colby’s; I loved his complicated relationship with Yashar, his djinn benefactor with mysterious ulterior motives.

This wasn’t a perfect book, however. To be honest, I found the storyline of Ewan and Knocks less compelling—especially after they grew to be adults. As an antagonist, I found Knocks’s motivations to be a bit baffling at times—and he felt a bit too uninterruptedly bad and angry to be compelling, with a background that was just too uniformly terrible. I felt the sense of place was a bit thin as well; there wasn’t much in Cargill’s Austin that didn’t feel interchangeable with, say, Williamsburg. At least not to me.  

Even so, I’m still fascinated by Colby’s story—and I hope I see more books that deal more with him specifically. The way the ending is set up, I felt there was plenty of room for more books featuring him—and I’ll definitely pick those up if I see them.