Return to the immersive, lush, and dreamlike world of the instantly bestselling dark academia fantasy A Study in Drowning as the aftermath of their first discovery pulls Effy and Preston on a final adventure and brings their haunting love story to its end in this stunning sequel and final book in the duology.
All stories come to an end.
Effy learned that when she defeated the Fairy King. Even though she may never know exactly what happened at Hiraeth, she is free of her nightmares and is able to pen a thesis with Preston on the beloved national fairy tale Angharad. She has finally earned a spot at the literature college, making her the first woman in history to enroll.
But some dreams are dangerous, especially when they come true. The entire university—and soon the entire nation—is waiting for her to fail. With the Fairy King defeated and Myrddin’s legacy exposed, Effy can no longer escape into fantasy. Who is she without her stories?
With Effy under threat, Preston is surprised to discover a rage simmering inside him, ringing in his ears like bells. He begins to dream of a palace under the sea, a world where he is king—visions that start to follow him even in waking.
As the war between Llyr and Argant explodes, Effy and Preston find themselves caught in the crossfire: Effy losing her dreams and Preston losing himself in his.
Are dreams ever truly just dreams?
A Theory of Dreaming is the sequel to A Study in Drowning by author Ava Reid. The first book was a gothic mystery with a crumbling manor, a contested authorship, and a fairy-tale monster at its center. This one is about what happens after the monster is gone: when the national myth starts to crack, the university turns hostile, the war with Argant tightens its grip, and two young people who survived something uncanny have to live in ordinary daylight.
Effy Sayre is now the first woman admitted to the University of Llyr’s literature college. Together with Preston Héloury, the Argantian student who became her partner in scholarship and in love, she has already exposed the secret behind Angharad, the nation’s beloved fairy tale: that it was written not by the revered Sleeper Emrys Myrddin, but by his wife. That revelation, treated as near-sedition in a country at war, follows them back to Caer-Isel. The university wants them to fail.
The press wants a scandal. Llyr wants its Sleepers—those preserved national authors whose bodies and writings are supposed to sustain morale—left untouched. The premise is strong. Reid is still writing about stories as infrastructure: who gets credited, whose work is used to justify a war, which voices are allowed into the canon. The Sleepers and their museum give the book a vivid political-mythic architecture. Preston’s new dreams of an undersea palace, where he is king and the dead can still be spoken to, turn the first book’s question inside out.
Effy once could not tell dream from reality. Now Preston cannot stop choosing the dream. The novel’s best idea is that escapism is not only a wounded girl’s private refuge. It can also be a young man’s temptation toward power, control, and a prettier version of grief. Dual point of view helps. Book one belonged more to Effy; this one gives Preston a fuller interior life, including the xenophobia he faces as an Argantian in Llyr and the rage beneath his usual restraint. Their romance is tender without being easy.
Love here is less a rescue than a fragile practice: two people trying to stay present for each other while institutions, war, and their own minds pull them apart. Large stretches are about depression, self-doubt, academic cruelty, medication, and the grinding hostility of being the wrong kind of person in a nationalist university. Those pages can feel true and also repetitive. Readers who came for the first book’s mystery-and-manor engine may find this one slower, heavier, and less enchanted.
The novel connects literary fraud to wartime propaganda, misogyny in the academy to the erasure of women from the national story, and personal trauma to the stories a country tells itself in order to keep fighting. That is a lot for a YA fantasy to carry, and the book is more successful as mood and argument than as tightly engineered plot. The dream-palace material is beautiful and sometimes under-explained. The academic mystery around additional texts and authorship is compelling when it is allowed to move.
The war plot arrives as pressure more than as a fully dramatized conflict, then resolves quickly once the novel decides it is time to close. A Theory of Dreaming is a lyrical, uneven, often moving conclusion to a duology about the danger of beautiful stories. It will reward readers who wanted more of Effy and Preston as people, more of Llyr as a nation built on canon and war, and more of Reid’s drowning-in-language style. It will frustrate readers who wanted another tightly coiled gothic mystery. As a sequel, it is not better than A Study in Drowning.
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