Review: Wake by Lisa McMann

Product Details
Simon Pulse, March 2008
Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1416953574
ISBN-13: 9781416953579
Ages: 14 and up
Grades: 9 and up

From the Publisher;

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....

I was fortunate enough to hear about this and snag a copy of the e-book that was being offered for a short time through simonandschuster.com. The publisher was allowing it to be downloaded for free and gives you 30 days to read it; I only needed one!

I got sucked into this story fairly quickly and it wouldn't let me go. Lisa McMann writes Janie's experiences like a date and time stamped journal or, perhaps, the form surveillance notes would take, which made the flow of the story very fast paced.

I think plot-wise it was a little thin, with Janie aiding the local police with a sting operation: it seemed a little simplistic. But what kept my attention were the human connections Janie made along with the possibilties of where Janie's life is headed and what she could achieve with her ability.

There seems to be a recurring theme with YA books (and I'll probably mention this often) where the parent(s) of the main character are almost non-existent. While I will acknowledge that this is true in some families, it can be hard to swallow as the norm in these books. It is a necessary factor, I suppose, in making the story as interesting as it is; it would complicate things if parents were running around interfering all the time. The teen character in question needs the element of freedom. Wake is no different, though I'm hoping that Lisa McMann will clear up why Janie's mom is the way she is in the follow-up books.

These minor negative aspects aside, I thought the concept was different when so many series' are centrered around vampires and werewolves, etc. I very much enjoyed reading Wake and have every intention of reading Fade and Gone, the second and third books in this trilogy.