Mister Impossible: a spoilery recap

middle books are like middle children

What happened in Mister Impossible?

IN SHORT

Mister Impossible is the second book in the Dreamer Trilogy, a spin off trilogy that follows the four-book Raven Cycle. Book two takes place mere weeks after book one (read the recap for that here), which ended with Ronan and Hennessy fleeing the Moderators with Bryde, a dreamer they met in dreamspace.

Since the close of book 1, Jordan has stolen Declan’s car and noped off to Boston, responding to a tantalizing invitation from Boudicca, the all-woman crime syndicate, suggesting they have something she wants. Declan is biding his time at the Barns, where he bosses his younger brother Matthew, represses both bad and good memories, and has dreamt creatures such as Hand Cat bust into his bedroom in order to wish a very, very good morning to their favorite nauseated boy (you know how cats always manage to discover which houseguests aren’t cat people and then torment them? That special sixth sense goes double for cats with hands). Hennessy, Ronan, and Bryde, meanwhile, have been busily using a variety of powerful dreamt tricks to prevent the murderous Moderators from killing any other Zeds.

But trouble stirs. Ronan’s nightwash is getting worse, Hennessy is losing faith in her ability to hold the Lace at bay, and a dreamt apocalypse seems nearer than ever.

There’s a lot going on here that $11 waffles won’t fix. Let’s get to it.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT SOME WOMEN:

• Boudicca, the all-woman crime syndicate, has always been interested in bringing Jordan Hennessy the art forger into their Crime Club, and by book two, that desire’s intensified: they’ve found out Jordan Hennessy is a dreamer, too, and they know just how to lure dreamers into their fold: with sweetmetals*.

• Liliana, the newest Visionary to work with the Moderators, has refused to turn her visionary power inward, meaning that she is still dangerous to other people when she has visions—but also that her visions will are not dangerous to her. So far, she has managed to avoid killing Carmen Farooq-Lane, her co-worker and also mebbe, just mebbe, her girlfriend.

• Hennessy’s mother, J. H. Hennessy (“Jay”), was a famous artist before she killed herself. She was also a terrible mother with completely unchecked borderline personality, which she has passed on to Hennessy, who similarly DOES NOT GET HELP PLEASE SOMEONE IN THIS BOOK GET HELP BEFORE THE APOCALYPSE. In Book 2, Jordan finds out that although she is a nearly identical copy of Hennessy, she is missing many memories of Jay.

• Holy shit, before I forget, speaking of terrible mothers, we find out in a memory that Ronan’s mother Aurora praised a young Ronan for manifesting a dream object, then told him, very cool trick, Mister Impossible, now let’s bury it! The emotional consequences of burying this lil’ metaphor then went on to ruin Ronan’s young adulthood, and naming the second book after Aurora’s pet name for Ronan went on to ruin the author’s adulthood.

• Rhiannon Martin** is an older dreamer who Bryde, Ronan, and Hennessy meet along the way. She dreams only one kind of dream: mirrors that show you a kind reflection of yourself. She seems like she would be a genuinely productive person to have along for the plot, so of course Stiefvater kills her.

**• Rhiannon Martin is the name of a reader who placed the winning bid in an auction to save a comic store during Covid lockdown. She won the right to have a character in the trilogy named after her. She also won the right to decide if she wanted to be a good character or an evil one. She did not, however, get to decide if that character lived or died. I DID. I CHOSE VIOLENCE.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE DREAM MAGIC:

• If a living dream’s dreamer dies, the dream falls fast asleep permanently, except, of course, if they are brought to rare places of power along the ley lines, where they must stay forever (or fall asleep when they leave).

• The ley lines are failing in power because of manmade interference along them, such as dams, power plants, server farms, and other electrical and geographical disturbances.

*• In book 2, the magic changes in a major way: our characters discover the existence of sweetmetals, which are objects that can keep dreams awake.

• Sweetmetals always seem to be art objects. Many of the most powerful hang in museums, but others are auctioned at unimaginable prices to powerful people by organizations like Boudicca.  

• The Lace is the name given to the big, dangerous entity Hennessy can’t stop dreaming about. In his scrying, Adam seems to have seen something similar.

THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THE BAD GUYS:

• The Moderators, finding themselves stymied by Ronan, Hennessy, and Bryde (“the Potomac Zeds”) at every turn, shift their mission to taking the Potomac Zeds out, no matter what it takes.

• please note that Bryde is not listed under the ‘Bad Guys’ heading, even though I do spend most of book two trying to convince you he ought to be here.

WHAT HAPPENED IN MISTER IMPOSSIBLE

The events of the Dreamer Trilogy are bound into several threads which eventually snarl together. It is easiest to remember them individually:

CARMEN FAROOQ-LANE: After the Moderators kill Rhiannon Martin in an attack on the Potomac Zeds, Farooq-Lane finally decides to quit the Moderators, taking Liliana with her. I’d like to say this was the result of a plenty of qualified talk therapy, but it has more to do with Farooq-Lane shocking herself by sparing Hennessy’s life in a moment of weakness instead of letting a small amount of escaped Lace kill her. Rather than think too deeply about whether or not this act of kindness has a deeper relevance for her life priorities or even give a think about whether or not the central premise of the apocalypse might be at fault, Farooq-Lane decides to continue on a solo mission of taking out Bryde in order to save the world, because picking on people you feel are less human than you are is always more fun than self-examination, especially when you have a beautiful woman at your side.

BRYDE: Unfortunately for Farooq-Lane, Bryde is not the architect of the apocalypse—he’s just a dreamer with one name, like Eminem, or Rihanna. He spends the first half of the book trying to teach Hennessy to stop dreaming about the Lace and trust herself, and teach Ronan how to control his dreams while he’s asleep and feel the strength of the ley line while he’s awake. Bryde wants Ronan to stop dividing himself into two people: Ronan, awake, and Ronan, asleep. When he's not being educational, Bryde leads Ronan and Hennessy on a mission to empower the dying ley lines, using industrial espionage and dolphins. Unfortunately, the purity of this vision can’t last: Bryde is a dreamt creature himself, brought into being by a deeply repressed Ronan. Ronan designed Bryde to express all his most violent and disappointed parts , the parts of himself least compatible with the human world. Now, far removed from the idealized dream that birthed him, Bryde is being torn to emotional bits by being forced to live a world he has been dreamt to hate. Poor dude, however, will probably get very little sympathy from readers, both because the other characters have spent most of the book thinking of him as the villain and also because he wears a windbreaker all the time.

DECLAN: Declan is one of those who comes to feel Bryde is probably the Big Bad, mostly because Bryde uses a mind-controlling orb to kidnap Declan for a tête-à-tête in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. But before that, things did seem to be going well for Declan. After weathering a rocky patch in his budding relationship with Jordan (she steals his car and takes it four states away), they make up in front of a John Singer Sargent painting and embark on a sexy, criminal montage together. There’s parties. Art. Bodies in trunks. Blackmarket deals. Sweetmetals. Madame!Gautreau! The highs are high: he proposes to Jordan. The lows, though, are low: Declan slowly realizes that while Jordan and the greater Boston area blow strawberries in his ear, Ronan is getting into trouble. Declan blames all of it—his drawing away from Adam, his blowing up of strip malls—on Bryde’s influence.

JORDAN: After learning of the existence of sweetmetals, Jordan devotes herself to finding out more about them. She wants to know their rules: who owns them. Who sells them. Who makes them. If she can make one. Namely, she wants to know if she can acquire a sweetmetal so that she can stop fearing Hennessy’s dangerous lifestyle. With a sweetmetal, she could live as an individual, no longer afraid of suddenly falling asleep if Hennessy died. And if she lived as an individual, she could become a famous painter and live a long life of Declanisms and oil paint. First, though, she has to get a sweetmetal, and she can’t make a costly bargain with Boudicca in order to do it. She begins to throw herself into painting her first true original, rather than a forgery, suspecting that the effort might result in a sweetmetal.

HENNESSY: Jordan’s dreamer has always suspected that Jordan (unlike Hennessy) is capable of a happy life, but in book two, Hennessy’s extremely unhappy to discover she was right: Jordan is doing fine without her. Better than fine! She is living a life of parties. Art. Bodies in trunks. Blackmarket deals. Sweetmetals. Madame!Gautreau! Hennessy’s overcome with jealousy as Jordan seems happily freed from their co-dependent relationship. This negativity means Bryde’s lessons on control come to naught. As the Potomac Zeds’ actions increase the ley lines’ power, Hennessy becomes increasingly afraid she’ll accidentally manifest the Lace in the real world . . . and increasingly unwilling to keep fighting her sadness and self-hatred. Although Ronan adores her, his particular lemon-juice-on-open-wound style of emotional intimacy only drives Hennessy away. Eventually, she gives up hope entirely that she will ever be a successful dreamer.

RONAN: Nothing says ‘I deal with my problems like a grown up’ more than dreaming an entire living person to contain all of your darkest impulses, and then shutting out everyone else in your life so that you can follow him around with a sword emblazoned with the words VEXED TO NIGHTMARE. Deeply depressed, certain the world doesn’t care for him, and suspecting he is the only one of his kind, Ronan spends this book being pretty insufferable, which, for a guy who was already fairly insufferable, is a nearly epic low. He pushes Adam away, allows Bryde to bedazzle Declan in an art museum, eats the sandwich right out of someone else’s hand, and uses dolphins to destroy public property. Throughout, he clings more and more tightly to Hennessy, desperate for her to succeed, desperate to see another dreamer surviving in the world. But deep inside, Ronan knows Bryde is his dream. Deep inside, he knows that if Hennessy leaves Ronan with Bryde, she’s really leaving him alone with his worst self. Deep inside, he is becoming increasingly convinced there is something about him that is fundamentally unable to exist in this world, and that the only way through is to break the world to make space for himself.

ADAM: If you think about it, everything I just wrote about Ronan is actually a little true for Adam, too, if you swap out the dolphins, the sandwiches, Hennessy, and Bryde for Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, and Harvard. Holy cow, being a freshman at I’m-Living-A-Lie University is the funnest.

MATTHEW: Okay, but not everyone is having the worst time! Matthew begins the book by having a crisis over the newfound knowledge that he’s a dream, but along the way, he gets to bond with Jordan, who is the only one holding a brain cell in this whole series, fight with Declan in a car, fight with Declan in a boat, fight with Declan in an art museum, and get his first part-time job. Simple pleasures.

THE CLIMAX

After Declan meets Bryde and becomes sure that he is corrupting Ronan, he and Adam betray the Potomac Zeds’ position to Farooq-Lane, hoping to snare Bryde, Bryde and Ronan get away, but an emotionally battered Hennessy gives herself up to Farooq-Lane and Liliana. While the Moderators harass Declan for information about Ronan’s location, Liliana convinces Hennessy to dream a gadget that will shut down the ley line’s power, letting her have a break from her fears of manifesting the Lace. Ronan, disoriented from confronting the truth about Bryde’s origin, is unable to stop Hennessy in their shared dreamspace.

When Hennessy wakes with the successful ley-line-stopping-machine, all dreams without a sweetmetal fall asleep. Birds fall asleep, many people all over the world fall asleep, Matthew falls asleep, the Moderators fall asleep . . . but Jordan doesn’t. Neither does Bryde, who has stolen a sweetmetal off one of the Moderators early in this book.

But Ronan does.

WHAT’S PROMISED?

• that we’ll get the answers to all the previously unanswered questions from book 1, PLUS:

• we’ll find out what has been driving the Moderators this entire time.

• we’ll find out what the real deal is with the mythology of Ronan Lynch.

• we’ll see Declan changing his relationship with his two brothers and his understanding of the rest of the Lynch family.

• we’ll finally see, for crying out loud, this whole tamquam alter idem situation get resolved, because this entire trilogy happened because Ronan Lynch threw a fit over being unable to get an apartment near Adam’s college, so surely we cannot stay marked unread forever.

• we’ll find Hennessy and Jordan on a collision course for a reckoning about their relationship and their relationship with Hennessy’s dead mother.

• we’ll see Farooq-Lane finally make a decision of her own.

• we will roast in the heat of a whole heap o’ apocalyptic fire.