No one who ventures into Voynich Woods ever comes out again—no one except Riley and Madelyn. While chasing after her little sister Sam, Riley gets turned around and stumbles deep into the woods. Or is something luring her in? The path ends at the Wishing Tree, a massive, ancient tree with nails and coins pounded into its bark. There she’s attacked by a masked figure and killed. Madelyn lives in the woods with her mother, a temperamental woman who spends as much time punishing Madelyn for not being her perfect little doll as she does smothering her with attention. Although she has magic, Madelyn tries not to use it for fear of her mother finding out and making her regret it. But when she finds Riley’s corpse, she can’t just walk away.
Her act of selfless resurrection is not without consequence. She brings Riley back, but she’s incomplete—there is a gaping, rotting hole at the center of her chest that is growing bigger. It also rattles the cage of a creature who has been trapped in the woods for a very long time and who would do anything to break free. Evil comes after the girls in more ways than one.
The world Cipri has built is atmospheric and full of looming dread. The Voynich Woods are as creepy as a forest in a horror novel should be, and filled with all kinds of unsettling folklore monsters. Once the plot kicks into high gear with the girls’ confrontation with one of Mother’s terrible creations, the horror gets intense. I’m a lightweight when it comes to horror (which is why I tend to prefer YA horror to adult horror), but even I had to skim over some of the body horror stuff at the end. It’s… visceral. Cipri understands their young audience and keeps it from getting obscene or unnecessarily graphic, but it is a lot.
Dead Girls Don’t Dream touches on several themes, but the biggest are abuse and addiction. Madelyn’s abuse is obvious. She learned to cope by separating her parent into Mom and Mother. Mom was caring and Mother was cruel. Mother “wielded the truth like sharpened scissors, cutting down to the bone” while Mom “blew up like summer storms, then fell into dangerous melancholy.” Mom abuses through words and emotional manipulation; Mother’s abuse is physical. The more Madelyn discovers about the depths of her mother’s cruelty, the harder it is for her to see a way to escape it. She’s often paralyzed with fear. Cipri approaches these moments with honesty and without shaming Madelyn. All she knows how to do is freeze. She may want to fight back, but it’s so hard to overcome years of conditioning yourself to avoid a confrontation at all costs.
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Dead Girls Don’t Dream
Riley lives in a loving home now, but when her mother was still around she experienced a different kind of abuse, one that was less intentional and not physical but still painful. Her mother’s battle with drug addiction spilled over onto her children. Riley and Sam still carry the trauma of all those years spent never knowing if they would have food at home or if their mother was dead or alive. She has learned that hope only leads to disappointment and that trusting adults is the quickest way to get hurt. The girls help each other get to the light at the end of the tunnel. Riley teaches Madelyn how to fight and Madelyn teaches Riley how to trust.
Even the title plays into this. It’s more literal than you might realize at first glance. Riley and Madelyn feel dead inside and experience death. Both dream—Riley has nightmares about her mother while the television show HMS Broomstick offers Madelyn a chance to fantasize—yet at the same time, they treat those dreams like flights of fancy. They don’t let themselves dream about life beyond the pain they’re currently trapped in. Dreaming leads to hope, and they can’t allow themselves that. Dead girls don’t dream, indeed.
Especially in this age of book banning and the parents’ rights movement, books like this need to get into the hands of teens who need them. There aren’t many young adult speculative fiction novels about abuse or addiction, making Cipri’s novel all the more vital. Teens need to see others like them surviving the worst the world can throw at them. They need to see what forgiveness actually entails and to know that they don’t owe that to anyone, no matter how apologetic their abuser seems. They need to see familial support and parental figures who would do whatever it takes to protect their wards, to know that not every adult is going to abandon or harm them, and to learn to be able to tell the difference.
Nino Cipri may be known for their short horror fiction and adult speculative work, but now they can add young adult author to their bona fides. Dead Girls Don’t Dream is loosely based off of a story published in Nightmare Magazine in 2017, “Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out!”. Get ready for Appalachian legends, strange magic, Frankenstein references, and a lot of body horror.
Dead Girls Don’t Dream is published by Henry Holt &Co.
Read an excerpt.
