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We are part of a group of librarian friends who have had an ongoing book club running for the last several years. Each “season” (we’re nerds) we pick a theme and each of us chooses a book within that theme for us all to read. For this blog, we will post a joint review of each book we read for book club. We’ll also post the next book coming up in book club. So feel free to read along with us or use our book selections and questions in your own book club! This season’s theme is books with specific colored covers where we all drew a color and matched it with a book.
Book: “As I Dream of You” by Jennifer Lee & LeUyen Pham (Ill.)
Publishing Info: First Second, May 2026
Where Did We Get This Book: Kate owns it
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Prompt Color: Blue
Book Description: Franny and Sam are each other’s entire world. So what do you do when your world ends? Frozen’s Jennifer Lee and Lunar New Year Love Story’s LeUyen Pham deliver a tour de force young adult romance with a supernatural twist.
Falling in love is supposed to hurt. That’s what Franny and Sam, two cynical teenagers raised on tales of heartbreak and loss, have come to understand. Yet when they fall for each other, they find the reality of love is something else it’s electrifying, all-encompassing, and easy. Theirs is a love that can conquer anything…perhaps even death.
But Franny and Sam’s quest to stay together—no matter the cost—soon blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and their shared dream threatens to turn into a nightmare.
Kate’s Thoughts
While I’ve been a Greek Mythology fan for practically my entire life, I highly enjoy Greek Myth retellings/reimaginings (given how much I’ve praised “Lore Olympus” on this blog the past few years this is probably not shocking). I’m always looking out for new ones, but I hadn’t heard of “As I Dream of You” by Jennifer Lee and LeUyen Pham until it was picked for Book Club. I don’t know if it’s because the Orpheus and Euridyce myth has never been a top myth for me, or because I just wasn’t as in touch, but I was definitely down to read it when I realized what it was.
And while it’s not a direct retelling/reimagining, the themes are there, and I thought that it was a nice foundation for the broader story at hand. After all, the heart of Orpheus and Euridyce is grief and the inability to let go. We have Sam and Franny, two teenagers who have difficult home lives but find love, passion, and companionship in each other. But after a fatal car accident separates them, they realize that they can see each other again through lucid dreaming, and keep running to each other, unable to let go, even though it becomes more and more dangerous as they hop between their worlds. The original myth definitely has themes, but I did like how Lee finds ways to tweak it and take it to places I didn’t expect. It’s emotional and incredibly sad, and I really enjoyed the themes of grief and trauma and being unable to stop looking back at the what ifs and the loss.
And I loved the artwork by LeUyen Pham. The use of colors were haunting and fit the theme perfectly, and I liked how before the accident things were uniform but still had splashes of color, but then after it was far more subdued and solemn as Franny and Sam were desperate to reconnect by doing so was causing damage and decay. I have seen Pham’s artwork before, but I feel like this was her at her very best. This just captured all of the emotions perfectly.
I enjoyed “As I Dream of You”! If you like Greek Myth retellings, seek it out.
Kate’s Rating 8: A bittersweet and aesthetically lovely reimagining of Orpheus and Euridyce with themes of love and grief and the inability to let go.
Book Club Questions
- What did you think of the art style in this book? Did you feel like it matched the tone?
- The Orpheus and Euridyce myth is a huge theme in this book. Once it was set up did it play out in the way that you expected it to?
- Did the nurse character that Sam meets over and over work for you? Why or why not?
- What did you think of the astral projection and astral plane and how it changed as the story went on?
- Do you feel like the two brother characters that Franny and Sam meet played an important part of the story?
- Have you every done lucid dreaming or had any other strange dream experiences?
Reader’s Advisory
“As I Dream of You” is included on the Goodreads list “YA Graphic Novels of 2026”.
Next Book Club Pick: “The Unicorn Hunters” by Katherine Arden
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