 Hello, beautiful people. My name is Rachel and this is my ARC review of Being an Absent Dream by Sean and Maguire. Now I was sent this amazing book last week by the publisher for an honest review and I am so over the moon about this. This is the first ever ARC that I received and if you'll follow me on Twitter then you will have seen the post where I am blubbering like a baby having received this ARC. I'm not going to share it with you guys today but if you'd like to see it then you can go to my Twitter link down there and I'll send you right to the post and also if you want to check out my Emojiathon wrap-up which I'll be having next week then you can go and check that link out if it's available now. But what I would like to focus on for this video is this damn book. Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Whoa! Whoa! Children are capable of grasping complex ideas long before most people give them credit for. In An Absent Dream is the fourth book in the Wayward Children series in which children who are going to, are in or have returned from portal worlds all are collected in this school for wayward children that is run by Eleanor West. Lundi is a good girl. She never gets into trouble, she always follows the rules and she has her life basically planned out for her. She is happy as long as she's being quiet, she's reading and she's just doing her own thing. Until one day when she happens across a door that takes her to the goblin market. We first meet Lundi in every heart of doorway which is the first in this entire series. She is actually the therapist at the school for wayward children and she is 80 years old even though she presents as a child and we're told that she's aging backwards. So this is her story. There are four rules worth knowing in the goblin market. Rule number one, ask for nothing. Rule number two, names have power. Rule number three, always give fair value. And rule number four, remember the curfew. The goblin market is absolutely beautiful. It is a faith type round with goblins tall and large and thin and small. Full of stalls, apothecaries and pie stalls. Shawna McGuire paints this as absolutely wonderful. The world building is just fantastic and you really feel as though you're there with her. On her first trip to the goblin market Lundi meets a friend who has a bit of a problem sticking to all four rules. No one serves friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion. And this is one of the things that Lundi really needs to learn in this book. One of the traits of the goblin market is that you can return home and return back to the goblin market as many times as you wish until the age of 18 in which the curfew is enforced and you have to decide if you're going to stay in the world of the goblin market or if you're going to leave the goblin market for good and carry on life normally in the human world and never be able to return back to the goblin market. When it comes to rule three, which is always giving fair value, that is something which is embedded within every single page of this book. It's really understanding what is fair value. Someone that has $100 in their pocket and wants to buy a pencil can easily give $1 for that pencil. But another person who has $1 in their pocket and wants to buy a pencil has to give all their money to buy that one pencil. And in the goblin market that's not fair. So the themes that this kind of deals with is understanding what is fair and what is not and how actually our world isn't set up in this fair way that's understanding what's fair value for each person. As I began reading this book I realised oh my gosh the writing is incredible and what Shaughnan does not only is she not a writer she's a storyteller through and through. She's also a puzzler. So we're not just reading the book. We are in this engaging experience with Shaughnan as she tells a story in this gamified way where we're trying to figure out what she's saying and meaning and it truly is a delight to read in this playful and whimsical way that she's written it. It is indulgent and delectably rich. It's certainly not the kind of book that you race through. It is a book that you enjoy like a rich chocolate cake and you sit there and devour it and really understand it and love it. I think that's really really important to know when you're reading a book like this it's worth your time and it's worth your energy to read it and to fully take it in. It's rare to find an author in our day where books are being churned out over and over again that crafts a story together so exquisitely. She spins characters and stories and scenes together so well that the language sings to you. It's just it's crazy. I was a little bit worried when I was getting into this because I hadn't really connected with Lundy all that much in Every Heart a Doorway so I wasn't sure how much I was going to be interested in her trials and in her backstory but wow was I wrong. Oh my gosh I really really understand her now and now I want to go back and read Every Heart a Doorway. In fact I'm probably going to do that so I can really take in all the lundiness and her particular situation that she finds herself in and why she's in the home of a way with children. Amazing. He shouldn't have treated her like his idea of a girl. That quote is one of my favourites from the entire book and it's when a teacher is speaking to her about what she should be doing and what she should not and it's one of the reasons why she actually wants to go back to the goblin market. He shouldn't have treated her like his idea of a girl and that is precisely right. People treat each other all the time based on their perceptions of who that person should be and what is fair and what is allowed and people are often very very wrong about how you should treat people and also how that person perceives themselves to be. If you love beautiful prose, fantastic storytelling. If you like the likes of Alison Wonderland, Harry Potter, Lainey Taylor, Leigh Bardugo and Maggie Steve Arter, then this is one of the books for you. You need to get on this series, it is phenomenal. So of this series we have Every Heart A Doorway, Down Among The Sticks and Bones, Beneath The Sugar Sky, which was my all-time favourite before we got to in An Absent Dream. I am also told that we have Come Tumbling Down, which is going to be released in 2020 and as soon as possible I'm going to be requesting that out for you. In An Absent Dream comes out in January 2019 and you need to buy this, you need to pre-order it because if any of those books that I've just mentioned are your kind of books and are your kind of authors then you're going to find this so divine. So thank you for watching my spoiler free art review of In An Absent Dream by Shauna McGuire. If you like this kind of content please don't forget to subscribe because the more of you that subscribe the more arcs I get and the more reviews I can give. Don't hesitate to connect with me on Twitter, on Instagram and on Goodreads and other than that I will see you all very very soon. Bye, bye bye.