A review by zillanovikov
Cascade (The Sleep of Reason, #1) by Rachel A. Rosen

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

5.0

When the climate apocalypse awakens monsters and magic, a group of misfit Canadian activists try to prevent catastrophe by working inside the system. Can the master's tools dismantle the master's house before the second wave of supernatural devastation?

If you've lived in this world for any length of time, you can probably guess the answer, even without Ian's precognition. But you still reach for hope. You debate trash television with good friends, you raise an aloe vera plant or a child, you fall in love. You march or write or teach or–you try, in your own way, to navigate your way through the labyrinth to a happy ending.

Cascade is a very hard book for me to review because I've been on a journey with this novel. When I met Rachel A Rosen, Cascade was unfinished. I read along as she wrote it, laughing at the jokes, wincing at the truths, decimating the semi colons. And more than that. In many ways, the character arcs of the novel mirror journeys I've been on in my own life. It's a hard thing to read the climate science and know I'm living in the end days. It's hard to look at a world where so much has already been lost and know the devastation is only beginning. Cascade holds a mirror to our world, and I see myself reflected back.

Rachel A Rosen is a very good writer, and Cascade is a very good book. I don't know what else to say, but I'm excited to talk about it with you when you finish reading it.