The Dallergut Dream Department Store

Starred review from March 1, 2024

DEBUT Lee's debut novel, a Korean best seller, is a charming foray into the land of sleep. Here, talented creatives produce dreams for sleepers to purchase. The luckiest sleepers will find their way to Dallergut's Dream Department Store, where the staff believe that dreams should matter, and do their best to match people with dreams that will improve their lives. Readers are guided through this world by the store's newest hire, Penny, whose willingness to speak up and ask questions allows for natural exposition and worldbuilding. While there is very little action, the novel is comforting and sweet. Many readers will appreciate the central messages, that life is better when well-rested and that dreams matter, no matter how nonsensical, stressful, or easily forgotten they might be. In fact, as demonstrated through vignettes about people in the waking world, sometimes the most irritating dreams are the push one needs to change their life. For a novel about dreams, the level of surrealism remains low, despite fluffy anthropomorphic tigers with pajamas and mechanical eyelids to monitor customer sleepiness. VERDICT This is an excellent choice for a gentle book club read.--Matthew Galloway

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 27, 2024
Lee debuts with the quirky tale of a store where dreams are sold in glass bottles to customers hoping to cure their various ills while unconscious. Penny, who gets a job as a vendor despite thinking she botched the interview, learns the trade of dream selling from her wise boss, Dallergut, and her colleagues Weather, Mogberry, Speedo, Motail, and Vigo Myers. Her gentle, episodic narrative chronicles the many customers and their desires. One patron wants her crush to appear in her dreams, while another, who is dying, wants to create dreams with parting messages for their loved ones. Some customers hope for a glimpse into the future; others use dreams to cope with trauma—though they aren’t necessarily happy with the results. The stakes are low and the plot minimal, but it’s a joy to spend time in this whimsical world and the endlessly inventive ways that Lee deploys dreams and nightmares will keep readers invested. This will especially appeal to fans of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

June 1, 2024
A young woman gets her dream job--working in a department store that sells dreams to sleeping people. Starting with the premise that the dream plane is a bustling metropolis, this book follows Penny, a new employee at the Dallergut Dream Department Store. The gently unwinding story follows Penny from her interview through her first year on the job. She works at the front desk of the department store and gets to know the managers and their teams on each floor above her: the hyperorganized Vigo Myers sells dreams of simplicity--quick getaways, hanging out with friends, enjoying good food--on the second floor; the cheerful Mogberry on the third floor sells groundbreaking activity-related dreams with her free-spirited teammates; the fast-talking, fast-moving, jumpsuit-clad Speedo sells nap-exclusive dreams with his team on the fourth floor, many of them to babies and animals; and Penny's loud, center-of-attention-seeking old schoolmate Motail on the fifth floor sells all the leftover dreams from the lower floors at steep discounts. Penny's mentor is Mr. Dallergut himself, descended, as legend has it, from the family that founded the metropolis. The story touches on the customers who arrive to buy dreams, never remembering that they're shopping for dreams but returning again and again; the furry Noctilucas who run around behind dreamers making sure they're properly clad in dressing gowns and socks if they arrive naked; as well as the dreams themselves: soothing dreams of people loved and lost, dreams of flying, dreams of eating, dreams to process trauma, and dreams of otherworldly worlds and richly drawn travel. Translated from Korean, this delightful story transcends Penny's experiences to be about so much more. A comforting story of dreams, lives, and the ways people process all that reality offers them.

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June 1, 2024
Lee's million-copy Korean best-seller is about to charm stateside readers, delightfully English-enabled by Seoul-based Sandy Joosun Lee. "Everyone wants to work at the Dallergut Dream Department Store," and Penny miraculously manages to get hired by Dallergut himself. Humans (and animals, too!) arrive from all over the world to choose slumbering experiences. On her first day, Penny must choose one of the five floors on which she'd like to work--"high-end, popular or limited-edition, preordered products" on 1; "dreams of simplicity" on 2; "groundbreaking activity-based dreams" on 3; shorts for nappers on 4; marked-down, black-and-white sales on 5. Penny advantageously chooses the front desk, providing the perfect vantage point to meet, greet, and mingle with both dreamers and dreammakers, including the "Legendary Big Five" soporific superstars. From becoming an overnight musical sensation to "Living as a Bully of Mine for a Month," from overcoming trauma to "Meeting with the Dead," dreams encourage, warn, enable, soothe, and sometimes just come true. With clever worldbuilding populated by engagingly quirky characters, Lee's whimsical debut offers an irresistible antidote to reality's distresses.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.