Genre: Fantasy, Romance, YA
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay
Reviewer: K.A.
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About The Book
It’s 1999, and Max Reid’s summer takes a strange turn when a boy in his dreams starts feeling way too real.
Seventeen-year-old Max seems to have it all—friends, attention, the kind of effortless charm that makes people look twice—but inside, his life feels hollow. He drifts through his days avoiding his mother’s meltdowns and going along with whatever life puts in front of him.
Everything changes when he starts dreaming of a boy named Andy.
Andy is nothing like anyone Max has ever met. He’s unguarded, honest, a little bit weird—the kind of person Max didn’t realize he’d been missing in his life. He makes Max feel truly seen.
Andy insists he isn’t just a dream, but a real person, sharing the dreams with Max. Max doesn’t believe him, of course. That would be insane. And yet, night after night, he escapes into that hidden world, forming a bond more vivid and intense than anything he experiences when he wakes up.
But the dreams are changing. Andy is hiding something. Whenever Max asks him to meet in real life, he refuses. He won’t explain why, leaving Max questioning everything, including his own sanity. Max is determined to prove Andy exists, because if the dreams end… what is he supposed to do with feelings for someone who might not be real at all?
And sooner or later, everybody wakes up.
They Meet in Dreams is a bittersweet, coming-of-age story exploring what it means to love someone you may never truly have.
Content Warning: This book contains themes of trauma, difficult family dynamics, and mental health struggles.
The Review
Seventeen-year old Max is miserable. Despite doing well in school and having supportive friends, his home life is slowly killing him. His mom never seems to stop rampaging through the house, and his dad never sticks up for him. His lone support, his older brother Marcus, had a falling out with their parents months ago, and now Max is forbidden from contacting him. The stress of his messed-up home is slowly destroying his will to live…until one night he finds release in his dreams.
Andy shows up as a literal dream-come-true, rescuing Max from his misery. They spend each night together, meeting in various dreamscapes, exploring abandoned cities, sitting on peaceful beaches, touring museums and eating their favorite foods. In time, Max falls for Andy, and worries about how he will navigate being gay through the homophobic society of the late 1990s.
Despite his fears, he is desperate to pull Andy into reality, so that he can have something positive in his life that is real to hold onto. However, the more insistent Max becomes in trying to meet Andy in real life, the more Andy shrinks away from him, seeking the comfort of fantasy and escapism.
Ultimately, both Max and Andy make a choice that forever changes them and their relationship together, concluding the book in a beautiful but heart-wrenching ending. Each page is beautifully written, and the characters are vividly and realistically depicted, and the contrast between the limitless freedom of Max’s dreams compared to the suffocating reality of his home life is utterly jarring.
I greatly enjoyed the novel, and finished reading it with regret, saddened that my connection with the characters ended with the final page. I look forward to more from this author.
5 stars.
The Reviewer
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KA Masters [she/her] is an ace author who writes queer fairy tales and historical fantasy. Although she believes that every good story needs elves and / or explosions in them, her most recent publication, “Sappho in Violet and Gray,” sadly does not include either. You can read more about her on her Goodreads Author Profile K_A_Masters.
