City of Vain Dreamers: Lost in the Mirage Review (Reviewer Copy)

    Kyle's goal in life is to eradicate narcissism and teach people about the more important things in life. His friends Becca and Jordan decide to join him in this mission. During their task, the three kids come across a mirror. When Kyle touches the mirror, his hand goes through it. They soon realize that they stumbled across a portal to another world. Now they have a slew of questions: what is this strange place? Are the people there as vain as the ones in the real world? The major question, though, is is there an evil at work?

    Keep in mind that everyone has their own opinion. This review is only my opinion, and you may have your own, different one. I would take into consideration what I say, but do not make a decision about the book solely based off of this review. Additionally, the author sent me this e-book as a free review copy; however, this did not influence my review. This is 100% my honest opinion. Let's begin:

    Unfortunately, this book was not really for me. However, like I said before, everyone has their own opinion. I saw a different review that said everyone should read this book which just proves my point. I will explain my reasoning behind my opinion, but please keep in mind other view points. I'll start off with some of the smaller things that bothered me a bit. 

    First, the three main kids are supposed to be around the age of 15. However, there were a couple of times where I felt like they talked in a way that was not realistic. There was a whole conversation between Jordan and Kyle that I could not get into too much because I kept thinking that I have never heard a 15-year-old speak like this. It is possible that this is just my experience with kids that age, though.

    It feels a bit repetitive at times. There were points where something was brought up more than once that I understood. For example, Kyle has a dream that is discussed at a few different points. This was done in a good way (meaning it did not sound like exactly the same thing over and over) that had a deeper meaning. However, there were other times where I zoned out because I felt a bit like I was rereading a prior part of the book. 

    The book revolves around narcissism. This is made very clear from the beginning. This next thing did not really affect me personally, but it may affect other readers. Narcissism is defined in the book, but this does not happen until it has already been discussed at length. In other words, the words narcissism and narcissist are repeated countless times before it is ever actually defined for readers; therefore, if you do not know what it is before reading, you will either have to look it up, try to figure it out from the context clues, or simply be confused for a while. Most likely, you will be able to figure it out. I feel like the author does make it pretty clear with the context clues, but I am including this just in case.

    There was one minor plot inconsistency that I came across. Marianne gave Brianna's notebook to Kyle to return the next day. Marianne told Kyle he could not do it herself because she was going to Japan for a week and would not be at school the next day. However, when the next day starts, not only is Marianne present at school, she is with Brianna. This left me a bit confused as to the point of the scenes. This is not a super big deal overall and does not hurt the plot as a whole much, it is just confusing and a little irksome. 

    I feel like there could have been more world building, especially for the mirror world. I understand that the world we start off in is just like the real world; however, I was a little confused when it came to the place the trio found. The way it is described I cannot tell if it is like a city, small town, village, etc. Also, it sounds for the most part like it is supposed to be like the real world with the exception of the people themselves. On the other hand, dragon-like creatures were mentioned which makes me think it is a fantasy world. I cannot think of any real animals that resemble dragons in the same context as the story. 

    I, sadly, did not really feel anything for the characters. Readers do not learn a ton about them other than their main goal of eliminating narcissism. The stuff I did learn made me feel for them in that moment, but the feelings did not last. I never grew a solid attachment to them, so it was hard to care much when they were in danger.

    The next couple of things are more technical issues. I found the formatting to be a bit strange. The dialogue is italicized which is something I have never seen before so I don't understand it, and every once in a while it is not italicized. I was confused as to why this occurred sometimes as I saw no big difference in the dialogue when it was versus was not italicized. Additionally, there were a couple of times when the spacing between the paragraphs was inconsistent, but there did not appear to be a reason why. I may simply be missing the reasoning behind these things, but I was thrown off by them. There was a fair amount of grammar and spelling mistakes. There were also cases where words were either missing or there were words present that should not have been. More often than not, it was easy to figure out what was meant, but it did take me out of the book for the moment.

    I have pretty mixed feelings about the ending. It felt abrupt, but drawn out at the same time. The kids were not in the true ending of the book, so it felt almost like two separate endings, the first being for the kids (abrupt) and the second being the true end (drawn out). My mind kept wondering while reading the true end because it just felt too long. Also, there was so much that the author could have worked with to make a second book if he wanted to or just make this one longer since it is a very quick read. It felt as if the whole book worked to get to a certain point and then we only got a summarized version of it. That summary could have been very cool material, and I feel like it was wasted a bit. It almost was jumpy in a way, if that makes sense.

    When Kyle first discovers the mirror, he talks about how mirrors are the perfect object to feed narcissism. This is a very valid point seeing as staring at and admiring yourself and/or spending time looking at and fixing your appearance for others definitely involves the need for admiration, something straight out of the definition of narcissism. I thought this was cool. I actually connected it to Divergent's abnegation faction, the faction that values selflessness to the point of forgetting yourself for others. In Divergent, Triss' mom does not let her look into the mirror too long when fixing her hair so that she does not act too selfish or narcissistic. I always appreciate being able to draw connections from one book to another, and I especially liked this one.

    I thought it was cool how the author talked about narcissism like it is a disease. I feel that really makes the readers understand the points that are trying to come across about narcissism throughout this book. It also adds to the negative view of selfishness on a whole new level other than the basic "it's bad" and shows the extent to which it is harmful.

    Overall, I found the book to be a bit strange in my opinion. It was definitely different from anything else I have ever read. The concept of it was really cool and it has a very good lesson that many people need to learn. I'm sad to say that I feel like the idea was not executed the best it could have been. It is almost like the author got so excited about the lesson of the book (understandably so) that he did not focus enough on actually creating the story. 

Rating: 2/5 stars

Author: Pier Cefalo

Publisher: Book Writing Inc

# of Pages: 197 

Genre: YA, Self-help (sort of)