Title: |
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter |
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Author: |
Brandon Sanderson |
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Category: |
Fantasy / Science Fiction |
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Rating: |
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Date Reviewed: |
July 17, 2024 |
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umi and the Nightmare Painter is the second of four novels that Sanderson wrote for a Kickstarter project, following Tress of the Emerald Sea. The third book is The Sunlit Man and I am already scouring the library shelves to find a copy. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter displays Sanderson's excellent talents as a writer - his ability to craft engaging characters, his createviness in world building, and his well thought out plots. Once I start reading a Sanderson novel, it is hard to read anything else, though I often read two or three books in parallel. |
The characters in this book are exceptionally delightful. Yumi is one of fourteen yoki-hijo, special talented Chosen people who serve all the people of her world. Yumi is now a young woman, and she has obediently served all her life. Yumi has been trained in the art of stacking stones. By piling stone upon stone, Yumi can create art, which lures the Spirits up out of the soil. Yumi then asks the Spirits to serve, and for five or ten years, a Spirit will then transform itself into something useful to help the people of the village - perhaps becoming a light source or a tool. Yumi is quite talented, in one exhausting rock-stacking session, Yumi calls an incredible thirty-seven Spirits forth to serve the village.
Everything about Yumi's life is bound by ritual - she must say the same endless prayers, take the ritual baths, dress in the proscribed clothing. There are two handlers, Chaeyung and Hwanja, who attend to her needs. Liyun is the stern, tyrannical manager who pretends to follow the directives of the Chosen while actually manipulating Yumi into fulfilling her endless role. Yumi secretly dreams of doing something different, such as attending the upcoming festival at the capital city, Torio, but Liyun reminds Yumi how special she is; naturally she would never flout her duties to the detriment of the needy villagers...
Nikaro (called Painter by nearly everyone) lives in a world shrouded by eternal darkness. The city of Kilahito is surrounded by a pulsating eerie darkness that light cannot penetrate. However, the technologically advanced engineers have discovered that the neon-green-and-magenta hion lines can be used to power lights and engines and communications. So civilization can survive in the endless darkness, though it is eternally threatened by Nightmares that materialize out of the darkness. Normally, these Nightmares are still-forming terrors, vague wisps that lack ability and substance - any painter can create a painting that convinces the Nightmare to take a harmless shape, at which point the threat is eliminated. Painter typically paints bamboo fields, and the threating night creatures are transformed into benign fields of gentle plants.
But sometimes a wily Nightmare can elude the painters and feast on the nightmares of sleeping humans. If the Nightmare is able to consume enough terrified dreams, it can "stabilize" into a material form, and which point it becomes a real dangerous threat, and only the top notch team of Dream Painters can hope to stop it.
One night, after completing his shift, Painter is heading home when he spots the subtle signs of a sneaky Nightmare. Has something slipped passed the human defenses? Painter follows the trail and peers through a window to discover a well-formed Nightmare crouched over the bed of a sleeping child. This terrifying entity is beyond Painter's ability to dispel, yet he manages to chase if off. He know he must summon the Dream Painters, but when Painter returns to his apartment, it feels if he is struck by a powerful blow, and he wakes up in Yumi's world, inhabiting Yumi's body, and no idea what is happening...
Yumi and Painter are so well portrayed by Sanderson that the reader cannot help but root for them. In each world (Yumi also ends up being transported to Painter's world), a huge threat has materialized. In Painter's world, it is the terrifying Nightmare that appears ready to stabilize. In Yumi's world, it is a invention of machine that can stack rocks and lure Spirits - threating to make the role of yoki-hijo obsolete. The climax of this novel involves how they face those threats. But before the dramatic ending, there is a lot of fun narrative as Yumi and Painter struggle to understand each other's world. Yumi is stunned by the freedom people enjoy in Painter's world- she can make her own decisions! Painter is amazed by the constant light in Yumi's world - the endless sunshine makes it so hot that the plants and buildings float above the burning surface.
The only reason I didn't award this novel five stars is because once Sanderson explains how it came to be that Painter's world is in eternal darkness, while Yumi's world is endlessly lit and hot - the explanation strained credibility, even for a reader who very willingly suspended disbelief. I think Sanderson was trying to be as unique as possible in his ideas (the hero is armed with a paintbrush, the heroine's ability is stacking rocks) and perhaps he got a bit carried away in his world building. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable story that is well worth the time spent finding and reading a copy.