Daydreamer
Rob Cameron
Hardcover/ eBook/ Audio
ISBN: 9780593572450
Labyrinth Road, August 6 2024, 400 pgs

Charles Rahman Housen is a daydreamer. Like most other eleven-year-old boys, he spends most of his time in school, where bullies and learning difficulties prompt him to retreat into his notebooks to draw his real friends—a host of magical creatures who inhabit the mystical Sanctuary he’s created in his mind to retreat from the loneliness of the real world.

That’s where most stories like this stop. There’s no shortage of dual worlds and portal fantasies where the imaginary steps into reality to meet the emotional needs of a lonely child. But there’s a thick, satisfying middle in between the dual planes of this story, like the ice cream in a sandwich. Charles has his challenging reality and his imaginative fantasy world, but in between those two extremes is his apartment building, which is inhabited by a host of magical immigrants in human disguises, imported creatures from stories told all over the world living low-profile lives. Charles’ closest friend in the real world is the building’s superintendent, a crotchety old man who is actually a fearsome, smoke-puffing dragon that tells stories of skin-walking magic folk to Charles and protects him from the scarier parts of both worlds, real and imaginary.

Or does he?

When a couple of trolls move in upstairs and begin to threaten the building’s community in ways that Charles doesn’t entirely understand, he’s confronted with questions about all of his mystical and mundane realities—what he makes, what he experiences, and what he observes.

So much is packed into the pages of this book. It captures the internationally cultured vibe of small communities in big busy cities perfectly. It pays tribute to world folklore by dropping mystical entities from around the globe into modern times, sometimes quite cleverly. Most importantly, the story is emotionally nuanced and really gets to the heart of what it feels like to be young, poor, neurodivergent, and lonely. While Charles has friends, they’re mostly of his own imaginary making, and there’s something really beautiful in how he conjures up the love and acceptance he needs, and really sad about how imperfect his imaginings of friendship actually are.

Charles is a boy in the 1980s inner-city, and this book does him the justice of recognizing that he and his age-mates are still small children, no matter what they go through. It also doesn’t take the easy way out by making the adults into perfect heroes, either. Charles’ hardworking Belizean mom, his grumpy Korean babysitter, and his beloved, mysterious dragon superintendent all care for him deeply, in different ways, but none of them are perfect and they’re not always right. The friends that Charles has created for himself—the denizens of the imaginary world he’s drawn—feel just as vivid as the people he encounters in the real world, though. The relationships built in this book are very flawed and very real, but they’re built around what all real-world relationships are—a desire to connect to the world outside of yourself. When people, things, and realities inevitably clash, they do so very messily, much like in the real-world—but there are reasons for that, which you’ll have to read to find out.

All of this is pretty heavy for a middle-grade novel, but the story is told in a way that manages to be readable across demographics but also age-appropriate, even at its most dire. I’d keep an eye on my kid while they read this and be ready to talk about some of the big moments and ideas with them. There’s also a question underpinning everything that happens between these pages that should earn this book a place on the nightstands of the parents whose middle-grade readers this book is aimed at. Through Charles’ adventures and the emotional twists and turns that they take, Cameron makes us constantly examine the nature of reality and perception, and if the differences are even important, in the end.

If you were a kid who loved the film The Neverending Story and how it turned a shy bullied child into a fantastic hero, you’ll love this book. If you were a Black or brown city kid in the eighties who stayed a child even when your surroundings tried to demand an early adulthood, you’ll also love this book. If you were a neurodivergent kid who retreated into your own world with its own rules that made more sense than the “real” one, you’ll also love this book. And if you were none of those things, but want to spend some time in a world that keeps you on the edge of your seat because the veil between reality and the fantastic is oh, so thin—get your hands on a copy of this book.