Jenny Dolfen

Our world. Our rules.

Added 2025-08-21 15:44:51 +0000 UTC

Her other hand emerged from the smoke and seized his. They held to each other as the city trembled, the smoke died, and the world changed. They clung to one another as light from above rained down and shone on her face. The last wisps of darkness vanished.
Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter rewired my brain chemistry. It's a love story that's also part Freaky Friday and part AI criticism (written a year or so before Midjourney and ChatGPT turned my timeline, and my teaching g job, into a nightmare that I wish I could paint into submission), part Ghibli and part Blade Runner. The ending was so beautiful that I cried (which I rarely do in books anymore), and it held sentences like these:

“You’re wrong about one thing though,” he said back softly. “You said the machine would replace you. It can’t. It can’t create art. Art is about intent, Yumi. A rainbow isn’t art, beautiful though it might be. Art is about creation. Human creation.”

I would not strictly recommend reading it if it’s the first Brandon Sanderson book you've ever read. If you do, you'll just need to accept that the narrator is weird and the owner of the noodle bar is even weirder. Both will still be immensely enjoyable, even more so once you're caught up on the Stormlight Archive, and they only steal the spotlight from Yumi and Painter for the tiniest bit of the book. It's also got GORGEOUS ARTWORK and is worth reading for that alone. (And I technically haven’t spoiled anything. =))