BookBrowse Reviews Dreamover by Dani Diaz

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In this graphic novel, a pair of young lovebirds struggling to adapt to high school fall into a lively, video game-like dream world—but they can't escape their real-world problems.

For Amber and Nico, eighth grade and middle school end on a high note: after a sugar-driven, end-of-year class trip at the beach, they confess their feelings for each other, become a couple, and spend an adventurous summer together. But high school—with its bullies, schoolwork, unappetizing cafeteria lunches, and larger student body—is more difficult to adapt to than they imagined. Leaning into late night instant messaging and digital games to escape their reality, Amber and Nico spend increasing amounts of time with each other, eventually becoming distant from their other friends.

Dani Diaz's graphic novel Dreamover compassionately illustrates the turbulent period that is young adulthood, especially the often-tough move from middle school to high school. Dreamover's scenes before high school begins—friendly banter on the bus; chicken fights in the oceans; secrets exchanged at sleepovers; swimming and pottery at summer camp—are infectiously high-spirited, filled with carefree rowdiness and mischief. In contrast, the subsequent drudgery of the high school days, with its panels awash in gray tones and full of frowning faces, depicting uneasy interactions with teachers and other students, is extreme. Diaz paints a sympathetic, and surely relatable, portrait of adolescent insecurities, ennui, and yearning for excitement.

Well-rendered, too, is the portrayal of first love between Amber and Nico. There are some cliché scenes: a rowdy leaf pile fight in autumn; catching each other while falling when ice skating; playing on the swings under cherry blossom trees. But these montages and other closeups of their shared affection are necessary and effective at showing how much they grow to rely on each other for emotional support. Their relationship isn't perfect, nor is it idealized by Diaz. In one scene, for example, Amber steamrolls a hesitant Nico into riding a rollercoaster. Though the day is overall a happy one, this small moment hints at a conflict at the core of their relationship: Amber's overbearing nature clashing with Nico's reticence.

Amidst their difficult high school environment and their intensifying relationship, their lives suddenly change when they fall asleep in Nico's basement while playing a video game and enter a bizarre dream world. The second half of the graphic novel is this dream sequence, in which the two of them explore a variety of panoramic and fantastic dreamscapes: lush forests, sea caves, endless grassland, vibrant fields of flora, and twinkling night skies that flow fluidly into each other. Amber and Nico are not completely subject to the existing dreamscape—they have the ability to directly manipulate what they're seeing, as when Nico purposely shifts the scenery from a relaxing field of yellow flower and sunshine to a hyper specific reproduction of his backyard, where his family is gathered. But in general, the environments that Amber and Nico experience are enchantingly surreal and whimsical, and they simply experience them instead of trying to change them. In one particularly memorable scene, they fall onto the wing of an airplane at dusk; there, they pluck glowing, orb-like stars from the night sky to skip, like stones, over the endless body of water over which the plane flies.

The dream environment also reflects Amber and Nico's emotions and inner turmoil, which makes the interpersonal conflict that drives Dreamover into something tangible and illustratable. The conflicts that Amber and Nico face in their waking reality—and which still exist in their subconscious—refuse to be shut out; instead, they weave creatively and obtrusively into the dreams, confronting the characters at every turn. During one blizzard dreamscape, after sliding down a snow-covered mountain, Amber and Nico unexpectedly encounter a pair of friends, longtime couple Stella and Grace, from whom they have become estranged during high school—at which point the background environment becomes an all-encompassing black, emphatically signifying a chilling sense of being emotionally frozen out. In becoming overly dependent on each other, it's clear, Amber and Nico have blown off and deserted their other friends, behavior they must own up to and apologize for. They cannot forever outrun real life—neither its external obstacles nor the consequences of their own actions—through escapist dreaming; this becomes increasingly explicit the further they fall into their dream.

The precarious way Amber and Nico have become each other's sole support systems—leading to an unhealthy and even destructive relationship—is another central tension of the book, and its consequences also become progressively unavoidable. In a blowout fight, Nico blames Amber for intentionally and selfishly keeping them in the dreamland, despite an earlier attempt to awaken: "You didn't want to go back. That's why we couldn't wake up." As they fight, their bristling antagonism bleeds from their minds into the fantasy, which is set on an already dangerous-looking shoreline dyed a sickly and muddy yellow-brown. The waves on the horizon surge with increasing aggression; the anger and frustration in the atmosphere is palpable.

Consistently delightful in the graphic novel's dream setting is its incorporation of video games as a psychological influence (see Beyond the Book). The parallel to gaming is most obvious at the "entry point" of their dream: Amber and Nico become the direct first-person players of the game they fall asleep to, and must navigate a flimsy cardboard boat past obstacles like sea monsters and whirlpools. Other dream panoramas, like underground caverns and underwater seascapes, are reminiscent of other video game worlds, as are the mechanisms they deploy to physically navigate the world—at one point, they leap across floating plateaus of grass and float upwards on the backs of human-sized bubbles beneath a twilight sky, a scene that undoubtedly draws from platform-based progression games like in Nintendo's Mario or Kirby franchises. In this way, Dreamover is also a loving nod to the storytelling power of video games, and to the way they can encourage imagination and connection.

This review first ran in the February 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.