Laura comes from a world similar to our own except for one difference: it is next to the Place, an unfathomable land that fosters dreams of every kind and is inaccessible to all but a select few, the Dreamhunters. These are individuals with special gifts: the ability to catch larger-than-life dreams and relay them to audiences in the magnificent dream palace, the Rainbow Opera. People travel from all around to experience the benefits of the hunters' unique visions.
Now fifteen-year-old Laura and her cousin Rose, daughters of Dreamhunters, are eligible to test themselves at the Place and find out whether they qualify for the passage. But nothing can prepare them for what they are about to discover. For within the Place lies a horrific secret kept hidden by corrupt members of the government. And when Laura's father, the man who discovered the Place, disappears, she realizes that this secret has the power to destroy everyone she loves . . .
In the midst of a fascinating landscape, Laura's dreamy childhood is ending and a nightmare beginning. This rich novel, filled with beauty, danger, politics, and intrigue, comes to a powerful crescendo, leaving readers clamoring for Book Two.
Dreamhunter is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
"It is like nothing else I've ever read." -- Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga
Editorial Reviews
Review
“It is like nothing else I've ever read. The characters are so real, you'll feel like you know exactly what they look like and how their voices sound and what they would say or do in any given situation. More than that, you'll want to hang out with them. Then the world is so amazing and unique. You will want to go there. You will want to walk into ‘the Place.' And you will want to sleep in a dream opera.” ―Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga
“Fascinating . . . will surely lure readers back for multiple readings.” ―Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A lyrical, intricate and ferociously intelligent fantasy . . . satisfies fully while pointing to the promised sequel. Provocative and compelling.” ―Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Readers pining for a fantasist to rival Philip Pullman or Garth Nix may have finally found what they seek in New Zealander Knox.” ―Booklist, Starred Review
“Attention-getting.” ―Chicago Tribune
“This series opener is a satisfying soap opera for young fantasy readers who enjoy intricate prose.” ―Voice of Youth Advocates
“Powerfully portrayed . . . It will appeal to lovers of fantasy set in the real world, who will eagerly await the resolution in the second volume.” ―School Library Journal
“An engrossing blend of Edwardian civility, family love, and powerfully imagined dreamscape. . . . Knox's writing is rich and interesting.” ―The Horn Book Magazine
“Knox effectively evokes the curious intersections and distances between the ordinary, earthly world and the parched otherworldly landscape of the Place . . . the adventures of the Dreamhunters are pleasingly harrowing.” ―Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
“Dreamhunter will find a large and enthusiastic audience among those who've grown up with Margaret Mahy, grown out of Harry and Hermione, or run out of Lyra and Will . . . Knox hits all the marks of adolescent fantasy fiction: gifted young people, powerful but absent parents, a mysterious place that both nurtures and threatens, a frightening conspiracy to be unraveled en route to maturity . . . This time next year, we'll all be queuing for the sequel.” ―Jolisa Gracewood, New Zealand Listener
“Dazzlingly inventive . . . In a book that is full of tenderness and family affection as well as presentiments of corruption and horror, Knox beguiles with vibrantly realized detail . . .A tantalizing feat of imaginative fiction.” ―Katharine England, Magpies magazine (Australia)"
About the Author
Elizabeth Knox has been a full-time writer since 1997. She has published several novels and autobiographical novellas. Her best-known book is The Vintner’s Luck, which won the Deutz Medal for fiction in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. The Vintner’s Luck has been published in seven languages and is being made into a film by Niki Caro (Whale Rider; North Country). Her book, Daylight, was short-listed for Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and her first book for young adults, Dreamhunter: Book One of the Dreamhunter Duet, was chosen as a White Raven by the International Youth Library, and winner of New Zealand’s prestigious Esther Glen Medal. Elizabeth lives in Wellington with her husband, Fergus Barrowman, and their son, Jack.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dreamhunter
Book One of the Dreamhunter DuetBy Knox, Elizabeth
Square Fish
Copyright © 2009 Knox, Elizabeth
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312535711
1 On a hot day near the end of summer, Laura Hame sat with her father; her cousin, Rose; and her aunt Grace against the fern-fringed bank on a forest track. She watched as her uncle Chorley and the rest of the picnic party passed out of sight around the next bend. Chorley turned and waved before he disappeared. Laura stared at the empty, sun-splashed path. She saw black bush bees zipping back and forth through the air above the nettles and heard the muffled roar of Whynew Falls, where the rest of the party were headed. Laura and Rose; Laura’s father, Tziga; and her aunt Grace were sitting under a sign. The sign read, CAUTION: you are now only100 yards from the border to the place. “The falls are loud today,” Tziga said. “It must have poured up in the hills.” They listened to the cascade pound and thump. Laura, who had never been allowed near the falls, tried to imagine how they would sound up close. Her father said, “Think how startled Chorley would be if one of these girls suddenly skipped up behind him.” Aunt Grace squinted at Laura’s father. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Grace. Why don’t we just get up and wander along that way?”
“Tziga!” Grace was shocked. Laura and Rose were too. The family had owned a summer house at nearby Sisters Beach for ten years, and at least once a year they would go with friends for a picnic up in the old beech forest. Every summer those who could would continue along the track to see the falls. And every summer the girls were forced to wait at the sign with their dreamhunter parents. Tziga Hame and Grace Tiebold couldn’t go and view Whynew Falls themselves because, one hundred yards from the honest and accurate warning sign, they would cross an invisible border. They would walk out of the world of longitude and latitude, and into a place called simply the Place. Tziga and Grace could no more continue on to Whynew Falls than Laura’s uncle Chorley could walk into the Place. Uncle Chorley, like almost everyone else, couldn’t go there. Tziga and Grace were part of a tiny minority for whom the rules of the world were somewhat different.
“Come on, Grace,” said Tziga. “Why should we make the girls go through all the ceremony of a Try? It’s only for the benefit of the Regulatory Body, so they can see their rules enforced. Why can’t we just find out now, in a minute, in private?”
Rose wailed, “It’s against the law!”
Tziga glanced at Rose, then looked back at Grace. He was a quiet man, self-contained, secretive even—but his manner had changed. His face had. Laura thought that looking at him now was like peering into a furnace—its iron doors sprung open on fire. Her father was a small man. He was a mess, as usual, his shirt rumpled and grass-stained, his cream linen jacket knotted around his waist, his hat pushed back on his dark, springy hair. Laura’s aunt Grace wasn’t any better turned out. Both dreamhunters were thin, tanned, and dry-skinned, as all dreamhunters became over time. Rose was already taller than her spare and weathered mother. She was white and gold and vivid, like her father, Chorley, and like Chorley’s sister, Laura’s dead mother. Laura had, unfortunately, not inherited her mother’s stature or coloring. She was little and dark, like her father. But—Laura thought—her father, though small and shabby, still had the aura belonging to all great dreamhunters. She liked to imagine that the aura was a residue of the dreams they’d carried. For when Tziga Hame and Grace Tiebold ventured into the Place, dreams were what they brought back with them. Dreams that were more forceful, coherent, and vivid than those supplied to all people by their sleeping brains. Dreams they could share with others. Dreams they could perform, could sell.
Laura’s father was saying, “We were pioneers, Grace. You didn’t ‘Try,’ you crept past the cairn beyond Doorhandle early one morning when there wasn’t a soul on the road. Do you remember? That moment was all your own. There wasn’t anyone standing by with a clipboard and contracts.”
Laura saw that her aunt had gone pale. Grace stood up. Laura thought Grace meant to walk away, back toward the road, to go off in a huff and put an end to Laura’s father’s crazy talk. But then she saw Grace turn to look up the track toward the border.
Laura’s heart gave a thump.
Her father got to his feet too.
Rose didn’t move. She said, “Wait! What about our Try? You’ve even bought us outfits—our hats with veils.”
“Rose thinks she’s a debutante,” Laura’s father said.
“I do not!” Rose jumped up. “All right, I’ll go! I’ll go now! I’m not scared. I was only trying to follow the law. But if you don’t care about it, why should I?”
“Good,” said Laura’s father. He offered his hand to Laura. She looked at it, then took it and let him help her up. She busied herself brushing dry moss from her skirt. The others began to amble slowly along the path. Laura caught up with them and gave her hand to Rose, who took it and squeezed it tight. Rose’s hand was cold, much cooler than the air, which, even in the shade of the forest, was as marinated in heat as the open paddocks, the dusty roads, and the beaches of Coal Bay. Rose’s hand was chilly, her palm coated with sweat.
Around the first bend was another, very similar. The track was flanked by black beech trunks. The sun angled in and lit up bright green nettles and bronze shoots of supplejack.
“I guess we won’t see the Place until we’re there,” said Rose.
“That is right,” Grace said. “There’s nothing to see. No line on the ground.”
Tziga said, “The border is around the next corner.”
They didn’t slow, or hurry. Laura felt that their progress was almost stately. She felt as though she were being escorted up the aisle, or perhaps onto a scaffold.
She didn’t want to know yet. It was too soon.
In two weeks Laura and Rose were due to Try. Any person who wanted to enter the Place for the first time had to do so under the eye of an organization called the Dream Regulatory Body. The Body had been set up ten years before. It employed rangers—those who could go into the Place but couldn’t carry dreams out of it—to patrol the uncanny territory and its borders. The dream parlors, salons, and palaces in which working dreamhunters performed had to obey laws enforced by the Regulatory Body and its powerful head, the Secretary of the Interior, Cas Doran. The parlors, salons, and palaces were businesses and had to have licenses. Dreamhunters, too, had to have licenses. A Try was the first step on the road to a license, and a livelihood.
The Body held two official Tries a year—one in early spring and one in late summer. Each Try found hundreds of teenagers lined up at the border. It wasn’t compulsory to Try, but many did as soon as they were allowed, because dreams represented a guarantee of work and the possibility of wealth and fame. Any children who showed an inclination—vivid dreaming, night terrors, a tendency to sleepwalk—were thought, by hopeful families, to have a chance at the life. A dreamhunter or ranger in the family was another indicator of potential talent. More boys than girls Tried, since parents were more permissive with boys, and the candidates were, by and large, in their midteens. The earliest age of a Try was legally set at fifteen.
Rose and Laura
Continues...
Excerpted fromDreamhunterbyKnox, ElizabethCopyright © 2009 by Knox, Elizabeth. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
