I’d seen such good reviews of Wake by Lisa McMann that I checked it out from the library as opposed to sticking with my resolution to not buy or borrow any more books until my ARC pile is completed. Alas, book diets are hard to keep.

When I originally started blogging, I was having nightmares, and I thought that blogging about them might be fun and amusing. I only blogged about my nightmares a few times, but I get them all the time. So how intrigued was I when I heard about this book, Wake, that was about a girl who was getting sucked into other people’s bad dreams?? Very intrigued! Oh, the potential!

But then I started reading, and the book was, well, choppy. Here’s an example from page 9:

A U-Haul truck pulls up next door. A man, a woman, and a girl Janie’s age (13 <– not in the book, but I thought it was pertinent to the quote) climb out and sink into the snow-covered driveway. Janie watches them from her bedroom window.

The girl is dark-haired and pretty.

Janie wonders if she’ll be snooty, like all the other girls who call Janie white trash at school. Maybe, since this new girl lives next to Janie on the wrong side of town, they’ll call her white trash, too.

But she’s really pretty.

Pretty enough to make a difference.

SEE! So the writing’s choppy, but Natasha said she thought that it worked for the narrator’s age and circumstances, which really got me thinking. Maybe there’s a purpose to this writing. So I checked the author’s blog, and her writing doesn’t seem to be choppy, so she obvs did this on purpose!

Sorry.

It still irritated me.

The story’s very simple: Janie gets sucked into other people’s dreams (which isn’t very convenient in math class, since she flops around like she’s spasming), and she watches the dream play out again and again, and even though she wants to help people, she appears to be helpless. Then she gets sucked into a really scary dream that freaks her out, because this guy turns into a monster and kills this other guy. EEK! All of a sudden voyeurism isn’t fun anymore.

I just think that the story could have been so much more. You know how when you bake something and it doesn’t turn out perfect? And other people love it and don’t notice the difference, but you know that your product could have been so much better? That’s how I feel with Wake. But perhaps the problem is with me, since I read this on the heels of The Hunger Games, which I loved so much that I wanted to have it’s babies, but I couldn’t because litcest (kind of like incest, but not) is illegal.

I’ll definitely be reading the sequel, Fade, so maybe the book did do what it set out to accomplish: it hooked me!

Rating: 84 out of 100

Check out the author’s website.

Buy the book at Powell’s, Amazon, or any other bookstore.

Other reviews:

Presenting Lenore

A Patchwork of Books

Maw Books Blog (and an Author interview)

Book Adorer

Karin’s Book Bytes

The Story Siren