Reading Yume by Sifton Tracey Anipare is like watching a Studio Ghibli movie, which is to say, this book is the ultimate experience that a reader can have. This novel tells the story of Cybelle, a Canadian teacher working in Japan, and Zaniel, who is a dream walker enslaved to the king of nightmares. I've never encountered the legends of the yokai before, and Yume was a perfect introduction because it didn't make me feel like I needed a basis of knowledge. The characters were smart and eclectic. The narration was quick, sometimes a bit confusing, but I appreciate the fact the author left some untranslated Japanese words because it felt like a truly authentic read.

An interesting premise, but I think all potential it has was not used fully. The plot is fairly simple, sometimes even boring. There were way to many downtimes and some scenes could have been cut, the book would have certainly benefitted from having a smaller middle section.

Yume was a delightful and creative book. I loved the characters and the concept. While at times I felt the plot dragged a bit, I found the book overall to be enjoyable.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

DNF 20%

Before I begin, thank you to NetGalley for providing a proof copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review.

I struggled with this book, immensely. I had high hopes from the premise and cover, yet the book fell flat.

I found the Yokai chapters (characters themselves) incredibly misogynistic, which the language reflected. This was hard for me to get around.
The separation of chapters to begin between Cybelle and the Yokai was incredibly jarring and without loving one side of the story, made it hard to enjoy the other. The untranslated Japanese comments, remarks and sentences (as a reader who doesn't understand Japanese) made me feel like I was missing things constantly, that there was a level of understanding I couldn't breach because I didn't know.

I wish this was better, but for me, its one I can't bring myself finish.

Really enjoyed this read, got through it super quickly, could not put it down.

Not to mention the cover is gorgeous, definitely need to buy the hard copy to add to my collection!

As a person who's been obsessed with Japan and Japanese culture for the majority of his life and has experienced what being a foreigner in Asia is, Sifton Anipare's debut "Yume" should've been the perfect book for me. And yet, almost nothing in it managed to grab my interest. There are quite a few reasons for that, I think. The first is the fact that the Anipare's novel is incredibly long but at the same time, not all that exciting or interesting. It's pretty telling when the most interesting aspects of a 500+ page tome are the diary-like chapters in which the main character, an English teacher in Japan, recalls her days at work. What makes them engaging, as opposed to the "fantasy" ones set in a dream world is the fact that they simply feel believable. It's as if they are taken from the direct experiences of the author, who worked as an English teacher in Japan, too, whereas everything else, all of the yokai and dream-world based scenes (I call them scenes because they don't really have much of a narrative or logic that connects them) are there just as a filler. Or because Anipare wanted to give her debut some kind of an "edge" or who knows what.
The second reason the fact that though the novel takes place in Japan and is supposed to be kind of based on the traditional beliefs there, all of them seem somewhat ornamental, like they are put just to be cool or to entice Japan-lovers to buy the book. None of the Japan-specific yokai seem to play a particularly important role for the development of the story, nor is the idea of monsters invading and controlling dreams specific for the archipelago. It's something we can see pretty much everywhere, even Disney/Pixar stuff...
And finally, the writing is so unengaging that it made me fight myself to continue reading this bore of a book. To be honest, many a time I wished it was around half the size and only about the author's experiences in Japan. I don't regret reading "Yume" but I can't recommend it to anyone.

Yume is an incredibly original take on the feelings of otherness and belonging. I didn’t know what to think going into the story but the cover and short description caught me attention. I loved the journey and writing style. The sparse but urgent way Yume is written kept me interested and invested throughout. I felt like I was there too, watching and holding my breath to see what would happen next. I can’t wait to pick up a physical copy of the book to share

Yume was a brilliant whirlwind of a book. I cannot wait to get a physical copy of it. The writing is as stunning as the cover. It was beautifully written and I could not put it down!

I would like to thank the publisher of Acrobat for providing me for an Advanced Reader Copy through NetGalley.
I was drawn to this book because it was about yokai. Unfortunately the writing style and the plot didn't grab my attention.

Yume has two voices in this book - Cybelle, a Canadian teacher in Japan teaching English and Zaniel, a dream walker, who is in the world of supernatural enslaved to the king of nightmares. Zaniel at first meets Yokai, who has a vociferous appetite for, well, everything. The Yokai causes problems for nightmare king and Zaniel sees this as a opportunity to be free.

Cybelle is seemingly unhappy - she faces lots of obstacles at her job and no one seem to like her and she doesn't seem to like anyone either. But why she still sticks to this job, is never made clear. The mundane and boring life of Cybelle is shook up when she meets Zaniel, when they meet in the real world. With Zaniel decision to help Yokai, Cybelle gets onboard.

Only from this point on Yume becomes truly enjoyable as a fantasy adventure. But the shifting narrative can be confusing (and the untranslated Japanese phrases might have made me miss some context as well) and its a little too long for the story its trying to tell. But to get to this point that is almost the last third of the book, there is a lot of exposition that could be done with out. Its a fairly long book that tells a pretty good story but not a very complex one. The conflict is simple and the solution is straight forward. <i>Yume</i> introduces a lot of Japanese folklore elements to readers and if one is new to this, the book is a great starting point.

Thank you University of Dundurn Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The story follows Cybelle, a black Canadian teacher living in Japan. Life is not easy for her. She often experiences racism, misogyny and xenophobia. She gets caught up in Japanese mythological gods and demons with the dreamworld escapism. I really loved the dreamworld and the yokai. The concept was really unique and interesting. The Japanese folklore was well executed but it definitely lacked depth. I enjoyed the folklore aspect of the story but the pacing felt really off for me

This was excellent. I enjoyed the disjointed story line in the first half of the book, and how it combined together midway to open up this cohesive story and plot line. The cover on this one is gorgeous, and while this book will take you some time to get through, it's worth it. The magical realism in this book was great, and I liked how things just "were" in the story - no explanations needed. I thought the Japanese culture was really interesting to learn about and read more on, and at times it felt like I was in a Studio Ghibli movie! Will be rereading.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

It was an okay story, with okay characters. I was not invested in the storyline sadly.

I really struggled with the pacing of this book and the kind of whimsical writing style that the author chose to use. I can appreciate what the book was trying to do, and think that it was well written; unfortunately, it Just wasn't for me.

Great insight into the lives of those who travel to work in different countries and cultures. This book took a bit to get into, but the mythology and fantasy is fantastic.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for providing a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book feels like a grown-up version of Spirited Away, the Miyazaki animated film. The spirit world of Yokai, or Japanese gods/demons, is more gory and violent in this book, but still colorful, whimsical, and grounded in folklore and mythology. Some humans can visit and interact with the other world through dreams. The story has surreal dream logic which sometimes is similar to fairytale logic. Things just are and they happen. Not much explanation. Cybelle is one of the humans who can walk in dreams, but she does not know it and does not remember much of what happens there. Still, things in the spirit world are creeping into her modern Japanese life as an expat English teacher. She loves teaching and cares about the children, but it is not easy. As a Black Canadian living in Japan, she experiences racism, misogyny and xenophobia every day. She has her own insecurities feeling like an outsider even before she left Canada. Cybelle was always interested in Japanese culture and hoped to find her place there. In Japan, that outside identity is compounded by her language and foreign citizenship. The judgements about her skin color are much stronger and openly expressed.

There is another human dream-walker, Zaniel. To protect himself from bullying and the dangerous Yokai in the dream world, he made a deal as a teenager with Akki, a powerful boar demon, to be his bodyguard. Zaniel has to bring women to Akki in the spirit world for romantic liaisons. That's the exchange. Over the years, it has become more and more unacceptable to Zaniel.

A conflict grows after Cybelle inadvertently trespasses and upsets Akki. It will become a pitched battle between the two and things get complicated in the waking world.

The descriptions are vivid. As I read the passages in the spirit world I can imagine it like watching an anime. There were clear parallels and connections between the physical world and the dreams. The transitions between the spirit world and reality were good. Sometimes they were purposely disorienting in that way of waking up from a detailed dream. Cybelle is the most fully developed character and I was rooting for her. I understood her conflicts. I feel this book did not need to be as long as it is. For me it was a little repetitive. I never lost interest, though. The tension builds and then releases and builds again and releases. Growing to a feverish crescendo in a couple of major showdowns. The final pages feel a bit rushed and the end is abrupt. In the second and third acts we get some explanation and Cybelle learns and remembers some things. There are plenty of side questions and details that are just left open. It was enough explanation for me, especially for this kind of storytelling.

I would love to thank Dundurn Press and NetGalley for giving me this book in an exchange for an honest review.

I loved the atmosphere and the mood of the story and i think that the writing style supported the environment of this book, it was whimsical and easy to read.
One of the negatives that i found with this book is that it has an extremely slow start. We start this book following Cybelle's life. It was really interesting at first, she feels very alienated in her environment despite her best efforts and lonely but after some time it got incredibly boring as i was waiting for everything else to connect and they finally did after 300 pages and unfortunately it affected the climax of the book and its resolution and it felt rushed. Another part of the book that i found lacking was that although the dreamworld and the yokai were interesting, there wasn't much depth to it. It is obvious that there is a connection between the dreamworld and Cybelle but nothing was explained and it fell quite flat for me. I did enjoy the two main characters and their dynamics even though i thought they didn't have enough depth but i think the story had an interesting concept but a messy execution.

For a somewhat longer than I expected book, this was pretty easy to read.

<i>I have received this book in exchange of an honest review, thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for the opportunity.</i>

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Yume is a bit tough to categorize easily in a genre or a sub-genre as it felt like an interesting mishmash of different ones that don't necessarily work that well together. The author in this one however, does make it work in a sense by involving the different point of views in the narrative. For anyone who knows anything about Japan or let's say anime as a closer comparison, the "idea" of an unseen world is incredibly common and you will see applications of series that incorporate that unseen world in their stories while also seemingly carrying on different more contemporary plot-lines at certain times like Noragami, Natsume Yuujinchou and Nurarihyon no Mago to name a few examples.

So seeing it in Yume was once again something interesting to me, as I really enjoy that aspect of their culture. It does however, make the point of views feel like separate books before the convergence of the plot at the halfway point or so. Until then, I got to see a closer to look at what a foreigner and more specifically a person of colour, potentially faces in that country, on what I'm assuming is based on the author's own experiences as she has spent 4 years teaching in Japan. There is a huge focus on the racism towards PoC, culture differences and workplace dynamics which I thought was an interesting take on the situation, but it also got me thinking a bit as well.

The world painted here is very racist and following Cybelle, it made me question why she stayed that long in that country and in that job specifically. I would've understood it a bit more if she seemed to enjoy at least one aspect in her life to a much bigger degree than momentary enjoyments, but she and to be fair, almost everyone in the cast were really unhappy about a lot of things. Which in turn, caused me to question their motives with <i>if you're free to go, then why don't you?</i> I eventually took it as a devotion to the job itself and a bit of a twisted idea of perseverance. This part of the book takes a good chunk of it where Cybelle experiences different types of the Japanese culture while facing the social issues that comes with it which was once again interesting.

On the Youkai side of things however, things were as bloody and twisted as expected with different demons being showcased and how it connects to the normal world. There is also a twist here that I picked up about 30% or so in the book, which I thought was interesting. I wouldn't comment a lot on this part of the book because it's easy to spoil, but if you're a fan of youkai and demons, then you'll most likely enjoy this part of it.

Given the length of the book, I spent a considerable amount of time in both worlds following two different plot-lines that it gave it a more mellow feel than what I kind of expected coming into the book. When the parts finally do come together, it doesn't really feel very dangerous and the resolution felt somewhat easy in the end. That being said for a big book, this reads quite easily which is always a plus and as someone who is studying Japanese at the moment, the huge amount of sentences and Japanese terms written in romaji everywhere was actually pretty fun.

The characters to me were just okay, I felt neutral to the majority of them more so than full on like or dislike by the end. Although, I will still say there is an ehhh side to both protagonists. Concerning Cybelle, while I won't say much about the human side, there is a big question mark surrounding her ties with the demon side and how that came to be which I didn't find an answer to in the book and to be honest, it sort of bummed me out as it felt way too interesting to be left out. Zaniel on the other hand has this weird shifting personality where he's a terrified of his shadow in some instances and then he's very confident which left me feeling jarred.

I can ignore all of the above nitpicks, the only big big criticism that I have here that weighed in on my enjoyment was the language used in the book. Despite the setting being in Japan, where 99% of the cast were Japanese, I never felt that I was reading about Japanese people. Yes, there is an abundance of romaji and terminology, but there was a constant feeling of the west here which I didn't think fit at all. I'm not western myself nor live in a western society, but I could not think of anything other than the societies or communities I watched on TV when reading this book and I didn't like that.

All in all, I do think it's got an interesting premise and an interesting progression, but there are still a few things that eventually weighed on my enjoyment.

Yume reads a lot like Murakami, but also a self-insert fanfiction.

I was intrigued by the premise: demons and Japanese mythology? Hell yeah! I was so excited. If only I could go back in time and tell myself to forego this story, especially so soon after finished 1Q84.

At first I thought it was interesting. The tone was very dreamy, which, given the content, isn’t too bad. However it’s like Anipare is trying way too hard to be literary. What she thinks is subtle is actually painfully obvious, which is sad because she might not say what she’s alluding to (literally. At all. Throughout the whole book); or it’s too overly subtle that you can’t figure out what’s shes actually trying to say; you have to figure it out yourself, whichever it is. That would be fine if the writing didn’t make it so confusing. The chapters are arduously long and within a sentence the perspective can shift. I had to reread pages because I thought my app had simply forgotten to load several pages since the chapter started with Cybelle, then in the middle of her narration transition to Zaniel, and then the Yokai.

The one thing this book has going for it is that it’s not 1200 pages like 1Q84, but it’s still about 300 pages too long. For every plot progression, the story goes back to square one, due mostly to memory problems, which is so tedious. Additionally, Zaniel and Cybelle don’t actually meet until about 300 pages in! I am so tired of romances where the love interests don’t interact directly for eons. In slow burns they meet and have small, intimate moments, like hands brushing; that’s the appeal of slow burn- all these small moments lead to a climax. When characters don’t meet, you fundamentally do not have a slow burn because these intimate moments can’t happen.

Also, I understand that this is a Japanese story about Japanese legends and myths but I do not know Japanese!!! As this is marketed to a Western audience, Anipare needed to included translations of all the Japanese uses, or forgo them entirely. I skipped massive chunks of dialogue because it was entirely in Japanese so I had no idea what was going on and had to infer from context of the actions and Cybelle’s internal dialogue.

I was also uncomfortable with how similar Cybelle was to the author herself, from her experiences to her time in Japan. It’s one thing to pull from your experience for characters but to make them go through the exact same things you did, doing the exact same things you decided to do? Leaves me feeling uncomfortable.

As for the characters, I didn’t like a single one. Cybelle complained so much but didn’t want to do anything about it; Zaniel’s characterization was sporadic and inconsistent; Akki felt like a ridiculous caricature of a dumb villain. The side characters received no development, despite Anipare trying to make them seem interesting and mysterious, especially Lieko. I only really liked Hino because she was purposefully made to be aloof and weird. Nothing about the characters is explained: Why is Lieko so uptight? She seems to have some connection to the yokai like Cybelle but Anipare doesn’t explore that at all. (Minor spoiler removed.)

It took me so long to read this ARC because I had no motivation. Some parts were interesting and captured my attention but then Anipare would flip the script because uh-oh! memory problems! and I’d be bored again. It was so tedious to read about the Yokai being confused every single time she appeared, Cybelle being a bottomless pit of hunger, and Zaniel being a protector one moment and a scared, shaking damsel the next. The only consistency in this book is the inconsistency.

Cybelle, an English teacher in Japan finds herself caught in a demon-filled dreamworld where everything is edible. She meets the delectable Zaniel, who is more than he seems.

Yume is a fun and fascinating book, filled to the brim with food references that's enough to make your own mouth water. However, a number of things were thrown around but not really answered, such as: why is Cybelle and the Yokai the one and same entity? I'd understand that Zaniel has some ties into the dreamworld because he's half Japanese and a "dream walker", but Cybelle, as mentioned numerous times ad nauseum, is a ""gaijin, so how did she end up being a Yokai, with full-on capitals?

Also, wasn't in favour of Akki's foul mouth and misogyny. I was half-tempted to DNF this book due to this character, but I really enjoyed Cybelle and Zaniel's chemistry, so I let it slide.

Many thanks to Dundurn Press and the author for the ARC. I enjoyed the book!