Wake by Lisa McMann

4/5*

Recently, I bought Wake for three bucks at Books-A-Million. Let’s just say I love that store’s bargain tables recently. The book was in perfect condition. Later that week, I found Fade and Gone, the sequels, and snatched them up, too. I’ll post my reviews of them later…I plan to read them before I leave for Kentucky on July 5.

Wake follows the life of Janie, a girl who intercepts other people’s dreams. She isn’t trying to do it, and she doesn’t even like to do it. And it’s getting old to her—especially the dreams about falling or being naked in a crowd that everybody has. She simply picks up people’s dreams if she is too close to them.

And the dreams are beginning to get frightening.

She picks up on a dream that is horrifying to her, and she doesn’t know who is having it, until the monster gets a face. And the face is one of her good friends.

There are lots of complaints in reviews about the writing of this book; like that McMann uses sentence fragments too often. That didn’t bother me at all, actually, but it did bother me was when she wrote like this sometimes: I hate. When. She. Writes. Like. This. Yeah, that’s seriously how some of the book’s sentences were. And it’s only a couple of times, but it’s enough to bother me.

Overall, I think that the book deserves better reviews, because it’s interesting. I loved the idea and the story, actually. I may be biased, though, because I’ve always been extraordinarily interested in dreams. (By the way, lots of the stuff they talk about in the book is possible, like changing your own dream and telling yourself what you will dream about, and that you will remember your dream. Just a cool fact.) I started the book last night and finished it this morning. For me to have that much concentration, it has to be a good book. And I think that Wake definitely was.