Cameron Roberson, who writes under the pen name Rob Cameron, is a teacher, linguist, and writer. He has poetry, stories, and essays in Star*Line, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Foreign Policy Magazine, Tor.com, New Modality, Solarpunk Magazine, Clockwork Phoenix Five, Lightspeed, and others. Daydreamer is his debut middle grade novel. Rob is also lead organizer for the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers and founder of Constellations Mentorship for the Octavia Project.
Daydreamer
An eleven-year-old boy copes with the challenges of his city life by weaving his reality into a magical realm of dragons, foxes, and trolls—until he must use the power of his creativity to save both of his worlds from destructive forces. This stunning debut is a profound exploration of imagination, community, and how the stories we tell both comfort us and challenge us to grow.
Charles’ life is split between two worlds: one real and one fantasy. In the real world, he is a lonely, bullied kid who can’t keep up with school when the letters refuse to stay still on the page, and is constantly in trouble for getting distracted. He lives with his mom in an apartment building, where Glory, the grumpy old superintendent, fills his head with stories about the Dream Folk.
In his fantasy world, the Sanctuary, Charles adventures with faeries and sprites and his two imaginary best friends. There, Charles’s bullies become ogres, and Glory opens his arms wide to transform into a dragon. But when trolls move into Charles’ apartment building and bring with them a terrible secret, the stories he has been told and the ones he brings to life grow more complicated. To protect everyone he cares about, Charles must harness his imagination in ways he never dreamed, in this unique story of the spaces and narratives we create for ourselves, and the ways in which fantasy and reality collide and blur.
“If you were a kid who loved the film The Neverending Story and how it turned a shy bullied child into a fantastic hero, you’ll love this book. If you were a Black or brown city kid in the eighties who stayed a child even when your surroundings tried to demand an early adulthood, you’ll also love this book. If you were a neurodivergent kid who retreated into your own world with its own rules that made more sense than the “real” one, you’ll also love this book. And if you were none of those things, but want to spend some time in a world that keeps you on the edge of your seat because the veil between reality and the fantastic is oh, so thin—get your hands on a copy of this book.” – Melissa A Watkins, Lightspeed Magazine
Daydreamer is a work of love, danger, and adventure. The journey to tell this story has turned Cameron into the writer he is today. The themes and ideas in Daydreamer: family wherever you can find it, shapeshifters, history, dragons, the mind and memory, a sense of awe for the countries existing just beyond our imagination, what real love looks like; all of them are things that Cameron knows he’ll continue exploring.