Title: The Cure for Dreaming Author: Cat Winters
Published: October 14, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Paranormal
Page Count: 352
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Olivia Mead is a headstrong, independent girl—a suffragist—in an age that prefers its girls to be docile. It’s 1900 in Oregon, and Olivia’s father, concerned that she’s headed for trouble, convinces a stage mesmerist to try to hypnotize the rebellion out of her. But the hypnotist, an intriguing young man named Henri Reverie, gives her a terrible gift instead: she’s able to see people’s true natures, manifesting as visions of darkness and goodness, while also unable to speak her true thoughts out loud. These supernatural challenges only make Olivia more determined to speak her mind, and so she’s drawn into a dangerous relationship with the hypnotist and his mysterious motives, all while secretly fighting for the rights of women. Winters breathes new life into history once again with an atmospheric, vividly real story, including archival photos and art from the period throughout.
Sometimes books just don’t work out. Cat Winters’ YA historical/paranormal crossovers are consistently unique and intriguing; they are well-written and entertaining. I liked both In the Shadow of Blackbirds and The Cure for Dreaming quite well on an intellectual level, but I was nevertheless not impressed in the long run. I did like the latter more than Winters’ debut, but only just.
One would think that historical fiction about suffragists and women’s rights would be something right up my alley. My own various interests could hardly align more closely than they did in The Cure for Dreaming. The story of young Olivia Mead, a “modern” young woman who desires only to vote for president when she grows older, should have been thrilling. I should have been swept away by her battle against the patriarchy and ignorance. But I wasn’t—in fact, I thought this book dragged, ran in circles. Though it was initially promising, by the last third of the text, I was thoroughly finished with Olivia and her story, and I couldn’t wait for the book to end.
Perhaps it was the paranormal element. There is something strange and unique in how Cat Winters writes the paranormal, and it’s both unsettling and slightly dry. I don’t feel magic when I’m reading her books; I feel somehow put off. Whether it’s ghosts or hypnotism or the Spanish Flu or suffrage, there is something in the way Cat Winters writes that pushes me away from the text, rather than invites me into the story.
It wasn’t that I hated Olivia as a character, or that she was underdeveloped or problematic. She wasn’t. I think The Cure for Dreaming is very conscious of empowering women and keeping that the main focus, even with strong romantic elements present in the secondary storyline. Neither is it that Winters cannot write; she can. There is no concrete problem with the author’s prose, but I nevertheless didn’t like it.
I did have issues with the portrayal of hypnotism, but hardly in a major way. Though it depends upon certain things, I do think hypnotism is a valid practice, and I personally know people who have been hypnotised out of addictions and the like. Yet there are limits to what hypnotism can do, so I felt that The Cure for Dreaming really stretched belief in regards to what Henri Reverie, the mesmerist, can do. Towards the end, the author does throw in the caveat that Henri is not your “normal” hypnotist and might possibly have magical abilities, but it’s hardly emphasized. So what I felt, while reading this book, was that the author had taken a legitimate practice and dressed it up and dramatized it beyond the limits of reality, barely making mention of the potential for magic and the paranormal all the while, then sort of expects the reader to just assume it’s magic. Which didn’t work for me because hypnotism is legitimate—just not in the way Winters portrayed. Honestly, I would have had less problems with this book if Henri Reverie had been clearly magical or clearly just a skilled scientist, but he was left in some sort of grey area. And I really, really, do not enjoy the sort of “mystical” approach to science because I think it just feeds anti-intellectualism, and I think by making hypnotism seem hokey and inexplicably paranormal, Cat Winters made an error.
But, at the same time, my commentary on Henri Reverie’s hypnotism in The Cure for Dreaming is all dealing with subtler, sub-surface things that don’t exactly affect the plot, but did raise some troubles in my dealing with the text.
The plot, however, did seem to come to a standstill towards the second act. Though the book takes place only over a period of a week or a bit longer, the last half seemed to drag on forever. It seemed like nothing was happening, though that isn’t exactly true. Perhaps it was because the events of the end unfolded in so predictable a manner that I was bored. In spite of its unique concept, The Cure for Dreaming doesn’t really have an surprises in store for readers. It was all very rote.
In spite of a good start, this book did not, in the end, satisfy me well. Cat Winters is an author who has an appreciative fanbase, but I do not like her books. I find the author’s writing to be repellant and vaguely unsatisfying, though I can point to no clear reason for it. The Cure for Dreaming is an intelligent, strange book that I feel I should have enjoyed, but I find that I don’t actually like it all that much. As with the author’s debut, I am not impressed with this novel.
