Official Review: Oneironaut by Phoenix Williams

[jcheiser]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Oneironaut" by Phoenix Williams.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Oneironaut, by Phoenix Williams, is a short novel about a man named Henry who loses himself in his dreams, wanting, and later needing, to spend more time there. At the beginning of the book, Henry notices that his dreams have taken on a strange quality in that they are continuous, with each dream picking up where the last one left off. He finds himself in a dream world where he has friends, a job - an entire life. He falls in love with a girl in his dreams and starts to spend as much time as he can asleep, just so that he can spend more time with her. Later, he seeks more answers about his dream life and dream world, and finds himself in trouble. He sacrifices his wife and his job in his waking life in order to prepare for events occurring in his dream life.

Oneironaut is story based on oneironautics, or the ability to travel within a dream. While the writing itself is interesting, with many wonderfully-crafted descriptive phrases, such as, “It fell out of his hand without a care in the world and joined its brethren of failed ideas,” the story itself is not as intriguing as it could be. Perhaps if the storyline were a bit more developed, the entire story would be more interesting, and maybe if the book had been a little longer, it could have been better. Williams certainly has talent, but I don’t think this work showcases those skills. There were occasional typos throughout the book, such as ‘them’ instead of ‘then’, and incorrect forms of words, such as ‘quick’ instead of ‘quickly’, but overall, Williams did not seem to have any consistent errors that would be indicative of poor technical skills; these are simply errors that were missed in editing.

One thing I am torn about is the transitions between the waking world and the dream world. The transitions tend to be quick, which can be sort of confusing at times, when suddenly the scene is different and the reader is going back a page to see what they missed. However, at the same time, this works really well with the storyline because Henry often questions which world is real and which is a dream, and he finds himself in a strange mixture of the two worlds. So, while these transitions are confusing for the reader, they make sense within the context of the book.

Something I would like to note is that this was poorly formatted for an e-book. I don’t know if it was the program I was using to read it or if it was a general formatting error, but having page numbers, the author’s name, and other “bottom-of-the-page” info in the middles of pages, during sentences, was a little difficult to get around.

I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. While somewhat interesting with its descriptive writing, it really isn't anything I would recommend to anyone unless they were specifically looking for a piece of fiction relating to oneironautics. I would, however, be interested in reading more from Phoenix Williams.

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Oneironaut
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[zeldas_lullaby]

Great review! I never understood before why people complained about digital issues with formatting. But what you said about page numbers, etc., makes sense.
I swear, my life is like that. I go someplace when I'm asleep and I have fully-formed relationships there that don't exist in the waking world. (I'm flying my freak flag with pride.) I might check this book out.