Review: Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charlie Jane Anders returns with the second of her admittedly weird YA sci-fi trilogy, and as she promised in a recent series of tweets about the ways that middle entries of trilogies tend too often to be More of the Same (I'll forgive her for naming one of my favorite middle entries, Catching Fire, as an example), this second book is pretty well different from its predecessor. For one thing, Tina is no longer the primary POV character - Anders instead toggles, every four chapters or so, between third person present tense POVs from Tina's friend Rachel and girlfriend Elza, with occasional interspersions of emails of various length from Tina and other characters. This time, we're not quite as concerned with building the universe as we are with destroying it - and there's a truly existential threat on the horizon that looms larger and larger as this book progresses, and it's not just the encroaching fascist movement rising higher and higher each day. More than before, this really does feel like part of something bigger, with a pretty diabolical cliffhanger leading into the upcoming third and final novel. I do wish that this book was bigger in and of itself, because (and this is a flaw I found with the first book too), it's really just too short (and, dare I say, a tad unfocused story-wise) to encompass all the complexities of this diverse array of alien and human civilizations. But again, Anders delivers on that diversity and delightful detail but good, from the distinct backgrounds of our three protagonists and all their assorted friends to the ways these friends all struggle to balance communications between themselves both in person and virtual. (And express some shared love for Olivia Rodrigo, proving that even if they're in the future, they're still Gen Z kids at heart.) But yeah...that cliffhanger. Charlie Jane Anders, how very dare you.

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