What do you think?
Rate this book
Chasing Dawn
Post-doctoral fellow, burgeoning psychiatrist, and someone living with dissociative identity disorder, life for Dawn Hollins has always been hectic. Sometimes it feels like all she has become is a walking calendar app for a group of personalities using a shared body and demanding lives of their own. It doesn't help that she's also a Changeling, someone touched by magic as a child, left straddling the worlds of humanity and magic. For Dawn, though, it's she has no magic, so she will just live as normal of a life as possible as someone with multiple personalities can manage.
When one of her greedy personalities takes a job for an untrustworthy werewolf...sorry, lupine...everything falls apart. Now on the run from the magical world she hoped never to touch, Dawn and her alters have to work together to survive. They have the power, but can they come together long enough to pull it off?
When one of her greedy personalities takes a job for an untrustworthy werewolf...sorry, lupine...everything falls apart. Now on the run from the magical world she hoped never to touch, Dawn and her alters have to work together to survive. They have the power, but can they come together long enough to pull it off?
447 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 21, 2022
2 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 18, 2022
I love contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy and contemporary magical realism. I love the genre(s) *even though* they tend to be formulaic and predictable.
I still remember my first readings of Charles De Lint's novels and loving them. The idea of magic happening in our own world is much more compelling and interesting to me than wild adventurs in totally alien landscapes. I still enjoy standard fantasy stories, but I find that urban fantasy is so much more relatable.
This debut novel from Terra K McKeown has that relatable aspect without being stuck in the same rut as most in the genre.
Yes, there are secret magical beings living alongside an unknowing “normal” world. What McKeown has done in this story though, is very interesting. It’s a wonderful blend of modern culture and concerns with brilliant insights into mythology and folk history and how they create our current pop-culture visions of them.
You would think that dealing with a main character with 6 “alters” living in her head would lead to either a bunch of cardboard cutout personalities, or simply be so complicated as to make the story unreadable. Instead, McKeown weaves the various personalities in and out of the story seamlessly, with each getting their own development and depth.
There are moments when the perspective changes from one alter to another fairly rapidly and McKeown pulls it off in a way that’s easy to follow and really enjoyable. I’m honestly impressed.
I can’t wait for the next book in the series.
I still remember my first readings of Charles De Lint's novels and loving them. The idea of magic happening in our own world is much more compelling and interesting to me than wild adventurs in totally alien landscapes. I still enjoy standard fantasy stories, but I find that urban fantasy is so much more relatable.
This debut novel from Terra K McKeown has that relatable aspect without being stuck in the same rut as most in the genre.
Yes, there are secret magical beings living alongside an unknowing “normal” world. What McKeown has done in this story though, is very interesting. It’s a wonderful blend of modern culture and concerns with brilliant insights into mythology and folk history and how they create our current pop-culture visions of them.
You would think that dealing with a main character with 6 “alters” living in her head would lead to either a bunch of cardboard cutout personalities, or simply be so complicated as to make the story unreadable. Instead, McKeown weaves the various personalities in and out of the story seamlessly, with each getting their own development and depth.
There are moments when the perspective changes from one alter to another fairly rapidly and McKeown pulls it off in a way that’s easy to follow and really enjoyable. I’m honestly impressed.
I can’t wait for the next book in the series.
July 27, 2022
its been a while since i’ve had the chance to fall into a world as marvelous as this one. I specifically love the careful care put into mental health and fantasy. I hope there’s more to this underworld that we have yet to discover. I must be patient for the next book >_< i suppose thats ok…
August 24, 2022
Engaging. An engrossing page turner with a gripping plot and interesting characters, this novel grapples with complex mental health issues in the context of an urban magical alternate world. Nestled in a story full of werewolves and half-goblins and secret magical police, are stunningly vivid insights into the trauma of childhood abuse, the resulting hyper-vigilance, and other responses, and a vision of what it feels like to live with dissociative identity disorder. All of these insights are delivered as part of the story, integral to the characters, never told to the reader in exposition. It's extremely well done and provides a level of depth unexpected in an urban fantasy novel.
Chasing Dawn is fast paced and dynamic, and the characters stick with you. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel!
Chasing Dawn is fast paced and dynamic, and the characters stick with you. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel!
September 14, 2022
I really enjoyed the creation of the characters in this novel, especially the main character of Dawn and her various Alters, but all characters were easy to visualize and follow. Although there promises to be another book, many of the main plot points were addressed, leaving the reader with the right amount of closure mixed with curiosity for the next story.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews