Book Review: Wake

Author: Lisa McCann
Publisher: Little Prince Publishing (December 23, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0615460534
ISBN-13: 978-1416974475

Synopsis:

Not all dreams are sweet.

For seventeen-year-old Janie, getting sucked into other people's dreams is getting old. Especially the falling dreams, the naked-but-nobody- notices dreams, and the sex-crazed dreams. Janie's seen enough fantasy booty to last her a lifetime.

She can't tell anybody about what she does -- they'd never believe her, or worse, they'd think she's a freak. So Janie lives on the fringe, cursed with an ability she doesn't want and can't control.

Then she falls into a gruesome nightmare, one that chills her to the bone. For the first time, Janie is more than a witness to someone else's twisted psyche. She is a participant....

My Take:

This was a quick read for me. Finished it in about four hours. I really liked the concept. That's the best thing about it.

The characters are hard to relate to because they're so paper-thin. Janey??? (not even sure if I got that right and I just read it and have photographic memory)the MC was solely defined by her ability and there wasn't much else given. Another character Cabel in the novel had the most dimension of anyone and I found him to be the most interesting. The other characters are forgettable.

I did enjoy the MC's arc and her struggle to figure things out and turn a curse into a blessing, but I felt at times, her emotions rang flat within all that.

The fragmented style took some getting used to, and I did, but I got tired of the passive voice and seeing so many ISes abound. I just think a greater attention to wording would've made the prose much more compelling and pleasing to the ear. WAKE is described as lyrical by the New York Times and I wouldn't consider this lyrical in the least. Choppy is more like it.

The dreams were also so very linear and too perfectly drawn out, and Janey always took them at face value. Dreams in real life are often symbolic and chaotic and far more bizarre than the ones shown in this book, and in most of the dreams she gets sucked into, they were actual scenarios that took place in the past or very closely linked to them.

You may like this book if you don't mind a sparse read, one that gives just enough for readers to be entertained and no more. Some readers don't care, as they can be gripped by the hooky concept alone. If you like more depth in your reads, you'll probably be disappointed in WAKE.

Overall, I didn't find this book terrible, it just wasn't amazing, and I think it could've been.

MY RATING

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.