When Keno was 15, he hacked into a system he shouldn't have. Mason and Wolf were sent to kill him but couldn't bring themselves to do it, so instead Keno was kept prisoner at a facility run by a mysterious group known as the Trust. Mason, Wolf, and others who work for the Trust are sent out to kill monsters, but Mason, in particular, has begun to doubt that the Trust is any better than the monsters he's asked to kill.
Mason and Wolf do their best to protect Keno, but they can't be around all the time. When Keno is 19 or 20 years old, one of the higher ups in the Trust kills someone in order to open a Gate to another world, and then he rapes Keno. Tamazusa, one of the beings who lives in the other world, kills Keno's rapist and brings Keno back to her world, the Dreamlands, in order to present him as a gift to Samojirou. Although Tamazusa and Samojirou were (are?) consorts, they've never been lovers - Tamazusa was too badly mistreated by men when she was human to want to have anything to do with sex, and Samojirou prefers men.
Luckily for Keno, Samojirou prefers his lovers willing. While the Trust gears up to invade the Dreamlands by force, with Mason and Wolf as part of the initial invading force, Keno tries to heal both physically and emotionally. Because Keno is the avatar of Samojirou's former lover, who was the son of Fuse, a powerful being in the Dreamlands, it's not safe for him to be seen as himself. Keno is taught how to dress and act like a woman, and he finds himself surprisingly comfortable as "Sakura-chan." Although Keno gradually begins to trust and even love Samojirou, the memories of his rape still frighten him.
Once the Trust figures out how to send their people to the Dreamlands, what little peace and contentment Keno has been able to find may be in danger.
Commentary:
I pretty much flew through the first half of this book. I loved the balance between the fairly dark storyline involving the Trust and Samojirou's attempts to win Keno's trust. I loved pretty much everything that went on in the Dreamlands: the way Tamazusa and Samojirou interacted, Keno getting used to his new life in the Dreamlands, and Keno slowly building up confidence as Sakura.
Since there are many, many authors I am unfamiliar with in the e-book world, my e-book buying strategies have gone something like this: make a list of all books that have a style of cover art I like, read reviews of those books, and then read the excerpts of any books that are still in my wishlist after I read reviews. Yes, my very first step involves judging books by their covers - it was the easiest way to come up with a short list of e-books to potentially buy, because so many e-books have covers that don't appeal to me.
Being a manga and anime fan, manga and anime inspired e-book cover art is almost guaranteed to put a book on my initial list. That's how things went with Dreamlands. The reviews I read indicated that the book would have some things I might like, but I was a little worried when I read that Dreamlands featured first person perspective, alternating from three different characters' perspectives. First person from one person's perspective is hard enough for a lot of authors - first person from three different characters' perspective seemed like a recipe for disaster. I read All Romance's excerpt, which gave me a taste of Ivey's writing from each of the three perspectives, Mason, Samojirou, and Keno, and decided I was willing to give this book a chance.
