The Dallergut Dream-Making District (DallerGut Dream Department Store, #2) by Lee Mi-ye, Sandy Joosun Lee
Narrator: Shannon Tyo
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, magical realism
Series: Dallergut Dream Department Store #2
Pages: 304
Length: 7 hours and 12 minutes
Published by Hanover Square Press, Harlequin Audio on July 27, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this bestselling follow-up to The Dallergut Dream Department Store, beloved characters must visit a special dream-making district to unlock new secrets about the customers they lost and hope to bring back.
It's been a year since Penny first walked through the doors of the Dallergut Dream Department Store, and surviving a year at the store means one thing… She is now an official employee of the dream industry! She can finally take the express commuter train to the Company District, where all the dream-production companies are located, and discover how all raw dream materials and testing equipment are produced.
But the Company District is not quite what she expected. Instead it hides a secret underbelly of the magical industry that Penny thought she was a part of.
Penny discovers the Civil Complaint Center, full of people filing complaints about their dreams. She also learns about the regular customers who have stopped coming to the store. As she gets to the bottom of each complaint, she begins to expand her horizons, moving beyond the role of dreamseller to understanding what lies in the hearts of their lost regulars.
The Dallergut Dream-Making District delves deeper into the dream industry and its customers. Why do some of them buy a dream and never return? And can Penny and her colleagues bring their regulars back?

My Review:

We say we’re heading for ‘dreamland’ when we go to sleep. What if that metaphorical country were an actual place? What if the dreams we dream weren’t so much born out of our individual subconscious but created in that dreamland by dream makers?

And if there was a place where dream makers live and work, wouldn’t there be a whole system and economy to support them?

That’s where the Dallergut Dream Department Store – as well as the entire dream-making District, came into being. It’s the place in that magical, mystical ‘dreamland’ where dreams are sold to sleepers all over the world, and where people like Dallergut and Penny live and work in the Dream Industry.

We first traveled – at least consciously – to this fascinating place in the first book in this duology, The Dallergut Dream Department Store. In that first story, we were following Penny, the newest employee at Dallergut’s, as she learned the ropes of her new job – and explored the ins and outs of the store and met some of the dream designers in the industry.

Just as the first book opened with Penny’s interview with Dallergut himself for that dream job, this second book begins with Penny having a rather different – but equally good from Penny’s perspective – meeting with the store’s owner.

Penny’s been on the job for an entire year, becoming a valued and trusted employee working at the store’s first-floor reception desk. It’s a jill-of-all-trades sort of job, and Penny’s enjoyed every minute of it.

This second book opens with the beginning of Penny’s second year on the job, and with her first annual salary negotiation meeting with Dallergut. It also comes with a perk, as employees of the store who pass their first year receive tickets to the Dream-Making District, the place where the magical technology of the industry happens.

Including the Consumer Complaint Department. Even in dreamland, every silver lining has a cloud, and the complaint department is certainly that. But each complaint also represents a puzzle to be solved and a customer to be wooed back to happy dreams, and Penny is all about both of those endeavors.

Which is a good thing, because those who have lost their way – or at least lost their way to dreamland – haunt Penny with a few of her own sleepless nights. Finding the answer – not one single answer but one for each unhappy dreamer, is the story within the story in this delightful and charming return to dreamland.

Escape Rating A-: I’m going to use the words ‘charming’ and ‘delightful’ a LOT here, because this book is definitely both – and so was the first book. What made that first story work, and works here as well, is that we’re still seeing this world through Penny’s eyes.

It’s not just that she’s learning as we are, and that she asks the questions we’d ask in her place, but also that Penny is just a generally nice person to be around so we’re happy to, well, follow her around.

This is most definitely a cozy fantasy/magical realism kind of story. OTOH, this is not the world we know. The logic of how things work doesn’t quite make sense if you look at it too closely. Very much on the other hand, if this were real it still wouldn’t be the world we know but we’d be too sleepy to catch the nuances while we were there!

(That being said, the way that the Consumer Complaint Center functioned in practice poked my willing suspension of disbelief really hard, while the rest of the story and its differences went down as smoothly as one of the ‘Calm Cookies’ that Dallergut himself seems to favor.)

Because Penny does know a bit more, we do get to see a bit more behind the scenes regarding how the dreams are actually made – and who makes them. The vignette about Santa Claus and the Nightmare Maker getting together to administer a bit of karma via ‘Guilt Cookies’ worked particularly well.

Like similar cozy fantasy/magical realism stories such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and my personal favorite, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, when you’re in the mood – or have the need – for something charming and delightful and just a bit sweet to carry you away any of these are the perfect thing to let you slip away for a bit.

In a week where I was particularly frantic, this was absolutely the right book at the right time. I have only two regrets: I did not have as much time as I would have liked to indulge in the delightful audio version, read by Shannon Tyo, and finished up with the text – which was still a LOT of fun, and at the moment, this book closes out the series.

Which does not stop this reader from dreaming that there will be more.