DREAM WIZARD

In Randall’s middle school novel, a boy uses insights gained from his nightmares to escape from kidnappers.

In a follow-up to Randall’s Dream Wizard: Conquers His Knight Mare(2020), the lead once again faces numerous unusual challenges. Sandy lives with his parents, sister, and dog in an old Victorian town house in Boston. He spends his time skateboarding and exploring the house’s hidden nooks and crannies. Sandy’s dog, Mr. Harris Tweed, is a fiercely intelligent border collie whose favorite pastime is taking himself down to the Boston Common and beguiling strangers into playing fetch. When Sandy falls from his skateboard, two would-be good Samaritans decide to kidnap the boy, and Mr. Harris Tweed follows after and waits for his chance to fetch help. Sandy, meanwhile, finds himself in Knight School—a shared dream environment where he and other children brainstorm ways to shape positive outcomes from their nightmares. Sandy and new friend Kat, a fellow abductee, join forces and plot their escape. Inspired by their dream epiphanies, can Sandy and Kat outwit their kidnappers and break free to rejoin Mr. Harris Tweed? Randall’s breathless mix of past and present tense can be distracting, and the plot is similarly chaotic, jumping from depictions of characters to episodes of imaginative play. Though much of this frenetic style seems unintentional, or even contrived, the prose captures, albeit imperfectly, the book’s central premise—the apparent randomness of dreams and events can be harnessed to positive effect. Randall, a professor of digital media communication at the University of the Virgin Islands, teaches classes in creative problem-solving and the psychology of sleep and dreaming. Elements of this work manifest in the open-minded resourcefulness of Sandy, Kat, and Mr. Harris Tweed. The story moves quickly, and while Randall plays fast and loose with punctuation (and foreign stereotypes), young readers will find themselves swept along. Numerous black-and-white pencil drawings from Lovely capture a child’s perspective of a world blessed with more light than shadows.

A disorderly but free-wheeling and exuberant adventure.