Colleen Mondor Reviews Dream to Me by Megan Paasch

Dream to Me, Megan Paasch (Feiwel & Friends 978-1-250-81705-1, $18.99, 384pp, tp, hc) January 2023.

For half-sisters Eva and Rhonda Sylvan in Megan Paasch’s Dream to Me, life has recently taken a terrible turn. Their mother long gone and Eva’s father just killed in an accident, Rhonda has assumed guardianship of teen Eva, although she is barely equipped for the task. Forced by finances to leave their New York apartment behind, they are waiting on a life insurance payout to bring some relief and have ended up as a last resort in the small (popula­tion 723) town of Madrona, Washington, where Eva’s dead great-aunt apparently bequeathed her a house a year earlier. That Aunt Miriam was unknown to both girls, and the legacy only found after Eva’s father’s death (why did he keep it a secret?) is troublesome but irrelevant. The sisters are desperate, and so to Madrona they go. What they find is a classic case of the ‘‘strange old lady in the woods who the village suspected was a witch.’’ The house is in disrepair, and they interrupt a couple of local teens spray painting ‘‘Ding-dong, the WITCH is DEAD.’’ So much for a happy welcome for the Sylvan sisters.

Dream to Me is steeped in all sorts of ap­propriately upsetting moments. The dark and stormy Pacific Northwest weather, the surly and downright aggressive townsfolk, the aban­doned house with its unsettling wall of photos celebrating Eva. It is widely acknowledged that Miriam, along with her sisters (one of whom was Eva’s grandmother), were part of a long Sylvan history in the town. What they did, or were capable of doing, no one seems to want to say out loud. But the local sheriff, a few teens who befriend Eva and Rhonda, and the owner of the inn where they end up staying while the house is set to rights, well, all of them seem like good folks who want to make them feel at home. Eva is soon suffering from debilitating nightmares, and there are plenty of locals who are outright rude to her, and then, one by one, everyone the sisters have an issue with starts falling into unexplained comas. It’s the sort of thing a witch would do to their enemies, isn’t it? I’m sure you can imagine how the fine folks of Madrona react to this.

Paasch ratchets up the tension throughout Dream to Me, keeping both sisters, but espe­cially protagonist Eva, on a knife’s edge as they try to get their lives together. There’s an old mys­tery to investigate, a death that was dismissed as accidental and involved Eva’s new friends, and there is the connection that Miriam seemed to feel for her even though, as Eva recalls, they never met. Most troubling of all is that the Syl­vans themselves, her family, are an unknown to Eva and her father was clearly determined to keep them distant. Is it because Miriam was a witch? Well, you’ll have to read to find out, but I can tell you that what happens in Madrona, what has been happening in Madrona, is way more nuanced and complicated and emotional then you can imagine. There’s a fine twist or two in this novel, and Eva is a downright delightful crime-solver – relentless and determined and fearless until the end. I relished every page of Dream to Me, the witchy novel that is so much more than what you expect.

This review and more like it in the March 2023 issue of Locus.

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