Dreamland Burning is a pretty good book. It has many different twists and turns which don't make it boring and it doesn't stay in one plot/area for too long. It takes place when Rownan goes back to his old family house, but when he gets there discovers a mysterious old family murder story. Rowan's sister Ruby is by his side for the whole book and helps him try to find out what happened. There are a lot of really good things that happen throughout the entire book. Overall the book did well and I think it's a good book.

The parts of the book with the most conflict are when they are on the train and people are trying to kill them and they bring guns onboard, and they have to hide but what happens next will give chills. The train scene is one of the best scenes in this book because. Whatever they were looking for brought trouble. People were on the train and trying to figure out what had happened.

The main characters are Ruby and Rowan. But there are a lot more characters and they get into a whole group to find out what happens in the family house. There is also- Lola the kid the other kid's names are, William, Mama, Indiana, Genia, Bennet, Chase, Ray, Samuel, and Aaron. Every person in the book had a place to go and the story was great. The themes were awesome and the action and traveling are amazing.

There are a couple of scenes in this book. The train the old family house. There is also their current house the school and the police station. There are a couple of things that take place at all of these places but they are mostly plot twists or page-turners. There are a lot of good stages to this book but my personal favorite would be the train part where they have to hide and what will they do if they think of a plan or get caught. Will they find the killer or escape?

I don't recommend this novel because if you're a person who does not like twists and turns or the story splitting into 2 different things happening and 2 different plot twists in the story throughout the book. Although the book was surprisingly good it was a real page-turner. But the book was not that bad looking at it. All the characters had a meaning and all of the story settings had a place to go, they all matched perfectly.

There were moments where I thought that person doesn’t seem the type to talk rather than immediately shoot or wouldn’t those people accept what you offered then kill you anyway, but stuff like that didn’t stretch credibility so far that I couldn’t get past it, that section of the novel was too much of a page-turner and I was too eager to see how it would all play out to quibble too much.

Similarly, I had to suspend a bit of disbelief at the beginning when Rowen and her best friend felt inclined to touch a corpse and also fish out the body’s wallet, withholding it from investigators. There wasn’t much of an explanation for that beyond curiosity. It is hard to imagine many people being that kind of curious rather than, you know, vomiting at the sight of the body and/or worrying about repercussions from the police for interfering with an investigation but again, like those instances where homicidal characters seemed momentarily (and conveniently) less homicidal, it wasn’t that hard to just let it go because Rowen’s story did become compelling and believable during a crime/injustice she witnesses as well as the way her timeline dovetails with Will’s 1921 timeline, the impressively paced mystery of the body unfolding across both timelines.

While I pretty much instantly loved Joseph and his sister Ruby (I especially loved her) and wouldn’t at all have minded if their POVs had been included, the character of Will is trickier to embrace, he did have more of an arc than anyone else in the book though, and I imagine it was a challenge to take him from Point A to Point B but the author successfully got him there.

The author’s note concedes that she dialed down the language and the horror of what likely occurred during the Tulsa Riot/Massacre, which makes sense as that likely would have been too much to digest in full, and fortunately the book isn’t any lesser for those omissions anyway, it still convincingly conveyed the ugliness, as well as the intensity and the urgency at that time for the black residents to reach safety. Overall, Dreamland Burning proved to be an emotionally engaging history lesson. ( )

The beginning felt a little slow to me, but I soon found I couldn't get the story out of my head, and it is VERY worth sticking with it, because the characters and plot pick up steam to become unputdownable. ( )

This book was tough to read but necessary to read. This book is a dual timeline, following Rowan and William as they live out their stories. Rowan lives in 2021, while there’s work being done on her house, a skeleton is discovered under her house, which leads her on a journey through time as she tries to figure out who it is. Meanwhile, William lived in 1921, during the Race Riots of Tulsa. He befriends Joseph, an African American kid looking to buy a Victrola for his mother. One night the end of May, the two boys are thrown together and William is faced with decisions about doing right thing as Tulsa burns around him. This book is heavy and as disgusted as I was with one of the characters, this book is a crucial read! As I finished the book, I cried - I don’t remember a time that a book moved me to tears but this one did. Highly recommend this book!!! Definitely in my top 10 for 2022! ( )

The book pulls you in right from page one. It is written between two 17-year-old perspectives: present-day Rowan Chase and Will Turman during the Tulsa race riots of 1921. A mystery unfolds when during excavation, 100-year-old bones are found on Rowan's property. This story is historical fiction at its best as it brings to light the covered-up ugly past of Jim Crow Laws and the 1921 riots in Tulsa. This story gives voice to a history that needs to be told.