Bookish Thoughts

The fifth installment in the Sandman series is all about identity. The way we perceive ourselves. The way other people perceive us. The things we hold back and the reasons we choose to do that. The ways we declare ourselves to the world or hide ourselves from it. The things we have control over and the things we don't and how those interact to create a picture we call "me". The story focuses on Barbie, who is trying to redefine herself in the aftermath of The Doll's House . After Dream destroyed the vortex that was Rose Walker, Barbie's life more or less fell apart. The two biggest indicators of this are that she stopped dreaming (and lost a big part of her internal world) and she divorced her husband (and stopped being seen as one half of the perfect couple). She's living in a crappy apartment in NYC, trying to figure out who she wants to be. And that's when her dreams come back to find her. Barbie's dreamworld, populated by her childhood toys and...

The third volume of the Sandman  series isn't an overarching arc at all. Rather it collects four individual stories into a single collection. Given that, I'm going to take each story separately. Calliope:  Initially, this was one of my favorite stories in Sandman . When I was first collecting the series (a process that took me years), I revisited this story again and again. In later years it lost it's shine somewhat, and I became hugely critical of it. Now I think I've landed somewhere in the middle. This is a story of exploitation. Calliope is a muse who has been captured. She's held hostage by an author who literally rapes her as a way of getting new ideas. When he sells her to another author rather than setting her free, as he'd promised, she loses her last shred of hope and asks Dream to help her. My issue with this story basically comes down to Calliope and her treatment, both by the fictional authors who hold her hostage (Erasmus Fry and Richard Mado...